Cloudflare’s 2022 Annual Founders’ Letter
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
Cloudflare is a big reason why this quote isn't true. They proxy "load testing" sites used to ddos people, and then restrict who can access services behind their ddos-resistant proxy. So even if you're VPNing around someone's censorship, in the best case your web browsing will be limited by your ability to solve captchas.
But I am still reserved about using Cloudflare because of my concerns about how much cloudflare centralizes the internet, Cloudflare's Webserver currently controls 20% of the internet(1), which is absolutely huge for a single entity.
I think if Cloudflares aim is to really to protect the internet, it should at least offer another option to just use DDOS protection without a reverse proxy, a way to protect websites without proxying everything Cloudflare with the huge amount of trust that requires, for the same price as the proxying service.
1. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/web_server