The old guard has left as they we too much of an expense in this cost-cutting age... without mentors, crap creeps in and now we are seeing what happens when people don't know how things work, are in charge...
What other popular site has zero images or video to speak of?
Also cloudflare is needed due to DDOS and abuse from rogue actors, which are mostly located in specific areas. Residential IP ranges in democratic countries are not causing the issues.
The main bad traffic that I receive comes from server IP ranges all over the world and several rogue countries who think it makes sense to wage hybrid war against us. But residential IP ranges are not the majority of bad traffic.
I would even say that residential IP ranges are most of the paying customers for companies, and if you just block everything else you most likely wouldn't need to use cloudflare.
Unfortunately firewall technology is not there yet. It's quite hard to block entire countries, even harder to block any non-residential ASN. And then you can still add some open source "i am human" captcha solution before you need to use cloudflare.
1. There were outages under the old guard.
2. The new guard is operating systems that are larger than what the old guard operated.
They might go on a hiring freeze, cancel a role, or in some cases pass on someone asking too much... But I don't think any major players are actively out trawling for "cheap and dumb". Certainly not Cloudflare, AWS and Google.