Fundamental flaws/oversights in the internet's design led to centralization, notably zero protections against malicious actors, bots, and botnets.

Cloudflare and co offer some of the only real solutions to that.

If you snap your fingers and Cloudflare disappears, you aren't left with a decentralized wonderland but rather the status quo where $5 of booter time can take most websites offline for the lulz, and all of your human users have to compete with infinite automated AI traffic (basically an amplification attack every time someone prompts an agent and it does a web search).

So, there's a third option where you like Cloudflare's services as a solution to flaws in the internet that led to the need for these services.

I like how I can slap up a free Turnstile on my projects in two minutes and not have to worry about endless comment spam and user registration spam. Yes, I understand there's problems with Cloudflare, but there's also a lot of problems out there in the wild west of an open internet.

For your first question:

- The workers platform is quite pleasant to work with compared to competitors. - Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc) - Having the ability to assemble globally distributed workers using bindings is dead simple - Their CI pipeline, while limited, is easy to setup and run and keeps improving - Their pricing is extremely competitive

For your second:

- That's my biggest conflict with using any service (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, etc). Don't have a good answer with what to do about it considering for many projects I don't have the time/energy to fully self host everything.

the dx is wonderful if you give claude code your global api key. and the price is amazing. you can deploy complex web apps for free. i love vite and astro which is built on vite. i ran both on cloudflare before they were bought by them. i'm happy. at least they weren't bough by adobe.

>Do you like the centralization of the internet?

Absolutely, makes blocking stuff so much easier!

IMHO Cloudflare ensures decentralization of the Internet: It provides an alternative to AWS, Azure, and GCE which gives your little personal selfhosting box or small VPS the same level of protection the big providers have. And generally, anything you have either hosted on or proxied by Cloudflare, can be pretty trivially moved to another provider. Whereas things built on top of AWS, Azure, and GCE services tend to be pretty stuck there.

Cloudflare has some big misses in it's history, like deciding to takedown a social media site for sex workers while defending a decision to provide services to Nazis at length, but in comparison to the alternatives it makes more decentralization practical than might be otherwise.

My issue with Cloudflare is how they enshittify all the open-source & closed-soure utilities they maintain. They vibe code it all now. It's crap. I'm sad Vite/Vue/whatever will go the way of that. Oh well, there's always Svelte. For now.