Also to do DDoS mitigation. Being able to see the HTTP request, at least headers and path, greatly helps with distinguishing attackers from legitimate traffic.

It's a tragedy that there's no standard to allow partial decryption/nested encryption in HTTP, which would allow intermediate proxies like Cloudflare to e.g. only validate a first-level authentication token and rate-limit access to a given endpoint, but not decrypt the actual request body, backend authentication token, or response.

Also desperately missing: Authenticated static file caching (think: cdn.foo.com serves files authenticated/signed by foo.com). Subresource integrity only works for HTML use cases and is clearly not ergonomic enough to make a difference.

And the best way to get people to let you do bad things, is to offer them something good, that uses the same mechanism. If I want to MITM the whole internet, what better way than offering free caching and bot blocking?

I even get to charge the bots extra to bypass the block, and then charge the customers extra to block the bots that are paying extra to not be blocked!