What a stupid fucking article, including "I grew up with cloudflare, therefore know nothing about how the internet works", and "cloudflare is a racket because I said so and give the benefit of doubt to myself". Web hosters never cared about what content they host. It was previously the norm to not even check for child porn and wait for law enforcement to make any decisions, and rightly so, as it's, literally, not their concern. Some web hosters did care about their content, but there were few and you could quickly move to another. Cloudflare are one of the new generation of webshit services, run by little babies, enamored by their big userbase (yeah, I had a big userbase when I was 12 and quickly got over that phase), and feel some sort of moral but mainly pretentious need to save the world, often by limiting who uses their service, or implementing some sort of snake oil.

New conspiracy theory: all these drama about absolutely irrelevant websites like 8chan[1] and kiwifarms are to distract from the fact that cloudflare has killed anonymity on the internet. Since 2011 or so, browsing any website behind cloudflare over Tor or pretty much shared IP address got you essentially blocked. You would have to fill out a captcha to even see the front page, and not just any captcha, but the worst one which almost never works when on a shared connection: recaptcha. THEN you had to open up the cdn.myshitwebsite.com and repeat the same bullshit, and then you can see images, css, scripts, whatever on the site. ONLY in 2018 they fixed this (it was always possible to bypass it by changing your user agent to a specific string and such things, but almost nobody knew about this), and then broke it again, I'm not sure what the current state is. Then around 2020, a bunch of cloudflare imitators popped up, which includes having the pointless captcha at the front of pages. Cloudflare literally killed Tor, it was solely their fault.

1. "But oh no, a jihad thing was posted on it", same with facebook but 1000x worse