> If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.

I disagree; most people need only a subset of Cloudflare's features. Operating just that subset avoids the risk of the other moving parts (that you don't need anyway) ruining your day.

Cloudflare is also a business and has its own priorities like releasing new features; this is detrimental to you because you won't benefit from said feature if you don't need it, yet still incur the risk of the deployment going wrong like we saw today. Operating your own stack would minimize such changes and allow you to schedule them to a maintenance window to limit the impact should it go wrong.

The only feature Cloudflare (or its competitors) offers that can't be done cost-effectively yourself is volumetric DDoS protection where an attacker just fills your pipe with junk traffic - there's no way out of this beyond just having a bigger pipe, which isn't reasonable for any business short of an ISP or infrastructure provider.