As someone who hosts a few “tiny websites” that are “hiding behind Cloudflare”, it’s because of some incredibly misbehaved botnet traffic that’s otherwise persistently scraping via residential proxies.

This is a hobby for me. It’s for my enjoyment and it allows me to provide resources that others enjoy using. However, I’m not going to allow literally 99%+ of requests to be aggressive scrapers that won’t give up until you’ve got a heavy-handed solution in place.

I hate it too, but the alternative is even more consolidation, so unfortunately this is just the reality right now and you’ll have to get over it until when/if things improve.