It would be one thing if OP was receiving cookie-cutter responses from CloudFlare's support team, but the CEO repeatedly personally intervenes and makes assurances that simply aren't true (and he's already made the same promises in this thread). How can those promises be taken at face value when it's still a problem a year later?
Most people wouldn't consider a multi-million dollar corporation that is beholden to federal regulation their 'friend' though. And if we're continuing your painfully hyperbolic analogy, if said friend kept insisting that they had or were in the process of giving me back my pencil any time I asked them over the course of a year, I would have some grounds to complain.
Oh, my bad. By complain on a small independent forum I really meant 'crucify him in front of seven billion people'. My mistake.
Is shaking your head, maybe adding an email filter or reporting as spam, and moving on with your life too traumatic an experience to go through? Is your life not worth living at that point unless you pull the fire alarm, evacuate the whole building, and publicly obtain vengeance?
I run into this all the time at work. We're at the point where we've spent 5 whole minutes talking about some software-driven bad behavior. Nobody is sure if this is the first time we've been affected by it (maybe it's the fifth time already, but it is starting to feel like deja vu.)
Someone suggests it isn't really a problem and we should ignore it. This person is very effective at their job and gets lots of stuff done once we've decided to take action. But there's a problem, actually tons of them, they're piling up now and we still have daily conversations about how they aren't a problem, (on a big long rotation so nobody seems to recall if we've seen this one before on any given day.)
If it was just a problem for this one person, well that would be a real anomaly. But adding a filter rule to always block is ignoring the problem, in the context of my work-life analogy, not fixing it.
I mean, I know in America, corporations are people and even have constitutionally-protected religious beliefs, but I'm sure Cloudflare will, with enough counselling, cope with the trauma of some mild public shaming.