Cloudflare's free tier specifically excludes video. See https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...:
Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business) Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.
The R2 overview page explicitly lists "Storage for podcast episodes", but a podcast host under the free tier would serve a disproportionate percentage of audio files.
I assume they don't want to become a file sharing website, but hosting a podcast is relatively easy on the bandwidth requirements.
A lot of people who had large image collections (like myself) online struggled with revenue relative to cost circa 2012, I saw a lot of sites I respected go down, though we did see some new style social sites such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Somehow YouTube was doing much better in terms of revenue/cost with video.
Compressing images for the web is not at all trivial, I over-compressed a few million images and really regretted it. When I post to social now I use Photoshop's "(Legacy) Save for web" which has a nice slider for the quality level and find I can get images I take with my Sony to look like they came from a pro camera between 80kb (small flower, blurry background) to 800kb. I see huge splash images on blogs that are smaller, they make a good first impression, look close and the blocking is awful.
It's these petty restrictions that make these pricing policies convenient, and it hurts the market :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://pricecontrol.biz/en/dumping-from-a-to-z/
If they had a limit of 50MB average per page navigation, would you call that rule consistent? It would have largely the same effect and I don't think it would affect the ease of dumping.