For me number 1 is difficult basically because of who runs Cloudflare. I trust Matthew Prince because I find him to be: consistent and credible.
I work in go to market, specifically for businesses like Cloudflare, I can and have said "this real world situation is going to have resonance for the next 5-10 days, what is the lowest cost blog post you could publish that is related?" - because I only manage teams who produce content that is genuinely, at some level, value add or interesting to my target market, you would end up with a blog post exactly like this. In fact, this blog post is doing that job, here we are, cloudflare users, discussing cloudflare.
Does it work out if we imagine that Prince and/or the person who wrote the post don't have the full picture of Cloudflares own involvement?