Maybe their point is just privatisation or something.
For example a dns provider like cloudfare just could artificially make latency costs for servers that don't agree with something cloudfare does bigger, which would result in them being less likely to be displayed in a search result because a search engine would have IP adresses faster from other servers. This obviously depends on if a search engine makes dns requests or just provides hostnames for the end user.
But everybody is also moving into their castle. Many for free.
They are not allowed to let people do that unless they have an argument that, somehow, this makes money for the owners of Cloudflare. Maybe that's in the form of good publicity. Maybe they're hoping to set up some tollbooths at the castle gate, once enough people are inside and the other options have withered for lack of customers.
That suggests they're less likely to try to frantically monitize in a way that risks killing their brand's reputation. Maybe they'll stay nice indefinitely.
My negative experiences as an end user take priority over any positive experience told to me by a third party in a usage case that doesn't apply to me.
You're all circle jerking around the problem. Proxy DNS and CDN's should be decentralised into standard protocols and not centralised into one company, for what should be obvious reasons (privacy being one of them).
I use CloudFlare on my websites and I feel like I don't have a choice. The fact that it's free to use proxy DNS is the kicker here, and the big selling point behind the DDoS protections. But the milliseconds CF DNS and page caching shave off page loads is also dangerous, because now it becomes mandatory if your websites are actually competing against someone else.
Again: this is a single entity, a single point of failure and in effect a monopoly. We don't just get to use it, we have to use it.
Of course one can't complain unless one has made an effort to do something about it, like I dunno, make a national version of CloudFlare?
Mwahahahaha! Didn't like that one, did you?!? Soon that will be mandatory and departments that investigate will honeypot your ass when they need a some justification for taking your in for a little private interrogation... wait, no, GO BACK!!
Okay, so protocols. Hard as fuck, static as hell. Yes? But, decentralised. Si? DNS proxying and content caches are staples of the modern internet. Content go quick, content go real quick ya. All we need to do is figure out a way to facilitate those things without having to rely on a single company, government body or even access to the many nodes that comprise the internet.
We used to write spec, damnit! We must return to the source. I have been some schmuck on the internet and this was my TL;DR.
Your experience as an end user is only available because cloudflare exists. That's why your end user opinion doesn't matter, because bad actors are constantly trying to ruin the internet and cloudflare is the gatekeeper. As a server owner I need security at the door to keep our illegal activity. Your opinion of "I don't like security at the door" is dually noted and immediately thrown away.