I agree with you. But, what solution do you propose for independent solo developers or people who wish to run a blog instead of using FB, Twitter and co to create content? Cloudflare may not be perfect, but it prevented me from shutting down my solo operation without putting a massive cost burden on me. When the first time DDoS hit, I had to beg one of those large cloud companies to reduce bandwidth costs. It took them forever to forgive that abuse and price, which was not my fault, and I was given a strong warning not to repeat such an issue again. There is no easy solution to this problem. At least with Cloudflare, people like me can stay online, but it does cause a problem for a bad IP reputation.

TL;DR: I won't expose any of my projects or API directly these days due to spam, ddos and other abuse.