Cloudflare has a free tiered caching option that helped my site. Instead of cache missing on local edge nodes always having to hit the origin, the edge node can sometimes pull the data from another Cloudflare server. It reduced load on my origin.
Agree with needing to tune and validate caching, one of the biggest changes my PHP site was tuning apc/OPcache sizes.
You don't think taking a small hit on TTFB is a good trade off for the improved scaling that a CDN offers?
Gone are the days that you don't have to worry about bot traffic being a DDOS. An unresponsive site is a lot worse than an extra TCP/TLS setup.
Disk as in spinning round circles, or disk as in NVMe drive, because there's a pretty massive difference in latency.