The Cloudflare client, cloudflared, works similarly but with less overhead. An encrypted HTTP/2 tunnel is being created from your machine to the Internet.
How is that different from any other SSL VPN? Also IPSec is even less overhead because the encryption is occurring at the IP layer.
This feels a lot like mid-2000s all over again (hey we have this new idea it's <insert SaaS-rehash of existing services>)