Have you ever hosted a website without Cloudflare?

In my case, the access logs alone from bots scanning for vulns grew so large that the server started creating.

Fortunately I wasn't running anything vulnerable!

Equating Cloudflare and NGINX seems a bit weird, they're entirely different tools with different purposes? Cloudflare has never done me any wrong as a web host or a web user. Calling it a cancer is very disingenuous.