> 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.

No, the actual alternative is learning to do it yourself. Unless you're a frequent target of UDP DDoS, there is almost nothing you can't defend against straight from the server itself.

Spending time learning how to configure your firewall, set rate limits in your web server, tune your application for caching and further rate limits, and should all this fail install a self-hosted captcha/proof-of-work fence yourself, is definitely a fair amount of efforts when those things aren't part of the core hobby.