> I think you're confusing what you wish was true with what is actually true.

And you are cherry-picking poorly sourced anecdotes to better suite your position.

A VPS with 100Mbps virtual adapter physically can't withstand DoS from single attacker with fiber connection (or equivalent of it). This does not have much to do with anatomy of DoS attacks, just simple math.

Cloudflare subsidizes their free users by giving a bit of bandwidth for free — the amount, that can be purchased from a decent hoster for several hundreds dollars. Of course, an attacker with several hundreds dollars can easily rent a botnet, that will demolish that "protection".