How is it ridiculous? It's called email obfuscation (it can be disabled within Cloudflare) it's to stop spam bots from ripping email addresses from websites and adding them to mailing lists.
It's laughably adorable to think it's actually solving a problem or helping in any way, the 'bad actors' it's trying to prevent probably have a work around anyway.
They do—changing your user agent is trivial.
To the target market, who have a spam issue, cloudflares protection sounds great, and by the time they've set it up, they won't switch CDN's just because it isn't effective enough.
Won't protect against scrapers that execute JS (like ones based on headless browsers -- This includes some modern search engines!)
Won't protect against anyone who takes some time to read their 80-some lines of minified "obfuscated"* JavaScript and hook up a simple text transform to their crawler of choice.
So basically it'll only protect against truly trivial scrapers, but not against anyone who wants to get at it and knows basic JavaScript. You could probably get about the same effectiveness by dividing the email amongst multiple <pre> tags...
*"obfuscated" in quotes because it just means whoever wrote it threw in a trivial to bypass XOR, some number character conversions, and for good measure had the JavaScript remove it's own script tag from the DOM after executing...
If a botter really wants to it's easy to get emails scraped. But they don't care. The demographic of people having obfuscated emails on their page via Cloudflare (since you probably don't know every obfuscation solution out there you target the big ones) is also the demographic with a good spam filter (or just using Gmail).
Botters don't care about everything small. If you're bigger you do get better ones who probably specifically target you and then you have more problems then just having your email stolen.
The 99% solution from Cloudflare is complex enough to not get botted by shitty wannabe hackers.
A better solution would be to change the email system to hinder abuse.