The explanation is at the end of the article: another GoDaddy customer asked for the transfer of a similar-looking domain name, and they transferred the wrong domain.
And then flat out lied that they received "the correct" documentation justifying the transfer when they hadn't received any documentation, and denied the appeal.
Frankly the whole thing is inexplicable. The best explanation is fraudulent business practices to save 60 seconds of looking for the documentation.
We have always hated working with them, and have moved all clients to cloudflare.
[citation very much needed]
If anyone else chooses to read the post then I suggest skimming the comments (that are mostly hidden by default) as well.
Maybe early/MVP product engineers should know better, but CFs own education materials do not teach you to expect that.
... CF for all their faults probably weren't the bad guy, when they discovered a "customer" absolutely taking the piss with capacity and doing incredibly sketchy things with domains to get around regulatory issues.
I have a courtesy hire car from a breakdown service at the moment with "unlimited mileage". I suspect they mean "unlimited mileage doing the sort of thing you do normally", and that "Unlimited, cool, I'm driving this thing from Scotland to Dagestan" would be met with opposition and a large invoice.
If CF decides you're subject to an invisible limit which they won't even tell you and you have your domains at CF, they hold your domains hostage. Luckily, these guys had their domains somewhere else so they weren't hostage. Don't be the one who is.
I love Cloudflare for my .com domains but they don’t support a lot of TLDs till date.
For my extremely simple needs, the website is domain name magic for a plain customer wanting a plain service.