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And a lot of US sites don't work in France either, or they ban you after just a couple requests with no appeal...

I find the same when using some foreign sites. I think the operator must have configured that France is OK, maybe neighboring countries too, the rest of the world must be checked.

It's not hard to understand why though surely?

You might have to show a passport when you enter France, and have your baggage and person (intrusively) scanned if you fly there, for much the same reason.

People, some of them in positions of government in some nation states want to cause harm to the services of other states. Cloudflare was probably the easiest tradeoff for balancing security of the service with accessibility and cost to the French/Parisian taxpayer.

Not that I'm happy about any of this, but I can understand it.

The antagonists in this case are not state sponsored terrorists, instead it's AI bros DDoSing the internet.