Why does every criticism of CloudFlare ignore the fact that they mitigate the largest DDoSes in the world in an age where DDoS-for-hire cost only a few dollars per minute? Nobody could do that on the budget of a 1996 local ISP with one or 2 part-time IT techs.

CloudFlare was launched as a stupid-simple CDN, but DDoS mitigation and bot reduction are actually valuable features for many websites. Sure, CF isn't the only business in this space, but most of their rivals are large enough to be in the S&P500 / Russell 2000, so it's not like garage startups are competing for this business.

"Was meant to be"

This isn't a law of physics. This was a starry-eyed hope by techno-utopians and academics when the internet was still 100% funded by Uncle Sam. When the internet moved out of its parents' basement, it had to grow up and get a job to pay the bills. Some people are fine with a SquareSpace webpage instead of running their own custom Apache httpd website on bare metal in a colo like it's 2005. The cost of maintenance and cognitive load is a cost we shouldn't ignore.

It turns out that economies of scale exist. The Internet doesn't need 10,000 small CDNs and they would all be inefficient and expensive if that was the distribution. Instead, there are a few large ones that can afford to colo in many geographically dispersed data centers and who negotiated bandwidth peering contracts for advantageous pricing.

You could also make the alternative argument: the internet as a truly decentralized network as imagined by nerds was never going to actually work due to its (now obvious) impact on the political economy of the world and its actors, and because fundamentally centralized economies of scale are how humans tend to organize society. So why are internet nerds on forums so narrow minded that they don't read understand this, because they don't read books? But both of these "arguments" are pointless posts designed to get head-pats, because everyone has made up their mind. Buy your DV certs from another ACME provider.

Capitalism, starting the moment TLD registrars first bid for the monopoly to charge rent. And continuing today, where I think only Cloudflare offer below or at cost domain registration, charging nothing themselves and just passing on the other mandatory fees to the rent seekers. It has had centralization at its heart since the beginning, when someone had to allocate IP addresses and everyone else had to agree (or we would have internets and not The Internet), which enabled this. I wonder if it would have turned out differently if, instead of central IP address allocation, clients had generated a UUID and it was accepted on The Internet unless consensus agreed it wasn't unique? But I don't think we knew how to do that then and technical limitations. Heck, crypto export laws would have killed it and required a central authority to prove that a UUID was you and not an imposter.

Because some people want power, and abuse it.

Evolution & the illusion of the separate self.

Key signing parties don’t scale.

The internet was never meant to be decentralized. It was a project researched and started by centralized entities (DOD, ARPA) that wanted to maintain command and control authority for a single person (POTUS) in the event of a physical catastrophe.

It was meant to be resilient and have multipath capability to route around damage. Having command authority sourced from multiple places was never part of the goal, and, indeed, in the client/server model that has prevailed the entire time the internet has existed, nothing about the design of the internet has been explicitly created to allow for server or data redundancy or distribution.

decentralized != distributed

Indeed, on the "modern internet" (aka the last 25+ years), everyone uses NAT, which means that end to end connectivity is not needed or wanted by most users and engineers. This idea that "every host should have a public IP, and every host should be a server as well as a client" is just fantasy that has no basis in reality, either in intent, or in practice.