Is there currently a more open alternative to Cloudflare? I would assume that people don't really use it until they have significant traffic from all different parts of the world?

In which case for the self-host people we can just pick a decent CDN?

I've done a few tests with CF hosted webapps... overall it's pretty good experience, and for my usage has been free, despite opting into a paid account level, I haven't exceeded the free usage.

For mostly-static or static-site content it's pretty nice all around. I've not gotten into the SQLite service so much though, which I might and seems interesting.. there's also Turso to consider as an alternative option... Not to mention Deno, Fastly and other similar options.

Kind of hoping to see something similar start to gain traction to support wasm backend systems similarly.

This is beyond their DDoS/Proxy protection, but worth considering as part of what they offer. There's a lot there to like.