As far as the privacy implications, remember that the site you visit needs to know your IP address in order to respond to your request, so while there are some issues to be aware of, it's kind of hard to see it as a privacy violation and not Cloudflare trying to squash the little guy, imo.
Also, what about DNS resolvers that don’t support EDNS at all?
There's an argument that CF benefits if that DNS extension is not in widespread usage. (Because CF sells a CDN but if sites can "just implement" that with DNS, then there's "nothing for them to sell".)
As you say, this could become a monopoly and it's cool to see a popular website standing up for a future where littler guys can still make it. It's not clear to me that's the precise argument he's made so I'm just guessing.
When did HN get these new awesome nav buttons? Root, next, ... amazing!