They do take care to avoid engaging with people who are opposed to their dominance on ideological levels ("no one should be the gatekeeper for that much of the internet", etc) and there are a small handful of questions they seem to avoid (e.g. direct feature-to-feature comparisons between Warp and Mullvad)

Here's a HN post with lots of very critical comments[0] from 7 years ago, including a fairly scathing one from 'tptacek. Even way back then, you'd get the same comments you hear today like:

> So rather than demand fixes for the fundamental issues that enable ddos attacks (preventing IP spoofing, allowing infected computers to remain connected, etc), we just continue down this path of massive centralization of services into a few big players that can afford the arms race against bonnets. Using services like Cloudflare as a 'fix' is wrecking the decentralized principles of the Internet. At that point we might as well just write all apps as Facebook widgets.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718947

What's always been interesting to me about this take is it's not as though Cloudflare is randomly inserting themselves in internet traffic.

Cloudflare customers have choice in the marketplace and they chose Cloudflare for whatever reasons. If end-users take issue with accessing the site of a Cloudflare customer they should take it up with the owners of the site that chose Cloudflare. Theoretically the Cloudflare customer would take it up with them if it becomes problematic. Cloudflare has no obligation to the site end-users other than meeting the needs of their customer who does have obligation to their end-users (theoretically).

Cloudflare is, ostensibly, providing a solution for their customers. How that impacts their customer's end-users is between Cloudflare and the customer.