I think you're confusing what you wish was true with what is actually true. For instance, here was a post from a few weeks ago about how one annoyed user was able to take down a Mastodon instance until the admin gave up and put it behind CF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21719793. Bear in mind, if you're running a Mastodon instance, you're probably well-aware of the downsides of centralization and would only give in as a last resort.
CF has problems, but pretending it isn't solving a real issue that is nearly impossible to fix otherwise, especially for individual admins running a side project, doesn't help anybody.
> I think you're confusing what you wish was true with what is actually true.
And you are cherry-picking poorly sourced anecdotes to better suite your position.
A VPS with 100Mbps virtual adapter physically can't withstand DoS from single attacker with fiber connection (or equivalent of it). This does not have much to do with anatomy of DoS attacks, just simple math.
Cloudflare subsidizes their free users by giving a bit of bandwidth for free — the amount, that can be purchased from a decent hoster for several hundreds dollars. Of course, an attacker with several hundreds dollars can easily rent a botnet, that will demolish that "protection".
"All Cloudflare plans offer unlimited and unmetered mitigation of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, regardless of the size of the attack, at no extra cost."
Do you know of an example of an attacker "easily demolishing" Cloudflare's free DDoS protection for a website with a few hundred dollars worth of botnet?
> Do you know of an example of an attacker "easily demolishing" Cloudflare's free DDoS protection
I can name dozens of websites, that folded under Cloudflare's supposedly flawless DDoS protection (at the time when they were still using it). Of course, the ones who fold are always websites themselves — Cloudflare itself is never affected, because when the DDoS gets particularly bad, they just detach websites from their CDN and expose it to attackers.
CF has problems, but pretending it isn't solving a real issue that is nearly impossible to fix otherwise, especially for individual admins running a side project, doesn't help anybody.