(I work at Cloudflare)

The Reddit and StackExchange stories are before my time, but I believe they related to reliability issues we were having at the time. It was over three years ago at this point, a lot has changed.

I have a personal connection with your comparison because my company actually used Fastly before I joined Cloudflare, I had the exact perception you're describing. Four years later, being able to write JavaScript with Workers would have made my life so much easier than trying to do failover in VCL as I was then.