I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.
The short answer is: A bit of both, really.
The longer answer is pretty detailed and would include all the positive things they have done as well as the negative things they have done and the unintended consequences of having so much of the internet “behind” Cloudlfare.
It’s sadly not a cut-and-dry situation, they’ve definitely added some cool, positive stuff to the world. They’ve also created a mangled mess for a lot of people where they’re blocked from accessing certain parts of the web because Cloudflare is throwing down a false-positive and thinks they’re a “bad actor.”
I would say it’s up to individual interpretation if they’re doing more “breaking” or more “fixing.” For some, far more is broken than fixed, and for others, it’s the opposite.
I fall in the “more is fixed than broken” camp, but the “more is broken than fixed” camp have plenty of evidence to support their assertions. I am not really willing to ignore the downsides just because they don’t affect me personally.
As a user of a small, privacy respecting VPN, Cloudflare is both great and awful. It’s great because Cloudflare captchas are single click usually while Google captchas go for infinity. It’s awful because just as often as I benefit from Cloudflare, I also get blocked by Cloudflare.