> Why not eg block Google Chrome?

I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here, even if you don't agree with it (just like me).

They need (in their mind, again I don't agree) to block these sites somehow, as they see it as them "stealing" viewers, judges agree with this. Now, where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral?

Cloudflare is not playing ball and turning of the streams, and they appear too quickly to go through court orders all the time. Banning a web browser obviously has a huge scope, so you're effectively left with blocking based IP, DNS or both/either.

Considering they are breaking local laws, and judges feel like something should be done to stop that, the solution they arrived at, regardless of how shit it is, is probably the solution with the least collateral damage, even if it has quite a lot.

Again, I don't agree with the decision, but I can also see from their perspective that they don't have a ton of choices, if we adopt the perspective that it should be stopped somehow.

I think the difference is that Cloudflare is the one party providing streaming access for their customers: not just anyone can proxy the data through Cloudflare, they need to be a Cloudflare customer first.

When I'm posting this message to Hacker News, I'm the "customer" of this website. I'm not customer of all the intermediate nodes in the chain. So if I were to write something illegal and HN would be irresponsive to takedown requests, the courts could order the IP of HN to be blocked, not some intermediate ISP.

Cloudflare provide a service masking the IP address of the illegal content, really you know the answer to when them and not Chrome

Because they own the IPs that pirates are connecting to which makes it relevant for those IPs to be blocked. They are the easiest IPs to find since you can just resolve the domain of the piracy site.