Of course it's a lie. Cloudflare is saying, essentially: "AI is making us so profitable that we've decided to reduce our profit by 20%, to keep it reasonable."
Their stock price has been pretty volatile for a while now (6+ months), so even with a swing of this magnitude I don't think it's valid to see it as much more than a correction.
They don’t need them. Simple as that
If we extend the logic, if we have 0 employees then profitability is maximized right? Then shouldn’t every company have 0 employees?
Obviously hiring increases profitability, otherwise some of the biggest headcount companies wouldn’t have hired so many people