> the talent required to clone Cloudflare is rare

Talent is everywhere, but a lot of people who have it don't want to move to a big city. So IMO, the next Cloudflare's developers should be as widely dispersed as its POPs.

Edit: The more recently added part of your comment is very insightful, and I hadn't thought about it that way. Still, I think we could go a lot further with old-school hosting providers if we traded PHP and Ruby for Rust, Nim, and the like. Note that I didn't mention garbage-collected languages, because lots of applications running efficiently on a shared host is incompatible with a garbage collector that really wants the whole heap to itself.