> On the other hand, nobody asked Cloudflare to be the unelected leader of the internet.

Except for everyone who pays them for their services.

Conditionally allowing some bots seems like another obvious service.

Maybe tcp/ip could've been changed to eat the lunch of Cloudflare before Cloudflare ever existed, but that never happened, so now you need to pay Cloudflare to fill the gaps in naive internet architecture to stop the shitstorm of abuse on the www. Yet it's never the abusers who get the HNer's wrath, only the people doing something about it.