Why do people use the reverse proxy functionality of Cloudflare? I've worked at small to medium sized businesses that never had any of this while running public facing websites and they were/are just fine.

Same goes for my personal projects: I've never been worried about being targeted by a botnet so much that I introduce a single point of failure like this.

Any project that starts gaining any bit of traction get's hammered with bots (the ones that try every single /wp url even tough you don't even use Wordpress), frequent DDoS attacks, and so on.

I consider my server's real IP (or load balancer IP) as a secret for that reason, and Cloudflare helps exactly with that.

Everything goes through Cloudflare, where we have rate limiters, Web firewall, challenges for China / Russian inbound requests (we are very local and have zero customers outside our country), and so on.

people think that running nodejs servers are a good idea, and those fall over if there's ever so much as a stiff breeze, so they put cloudflare in front and call it a day.

It gives really good caching functionality so you can have large amounts of traffic and your site can easily handle it. Plus they don't charge for egress traffic.

I’m surprised your projects aren’t plagued by massive waves of scraping traffic like the rest of us. Count yourself lucky, not superior.

It's chic. Young bois or adult pepl with boi like mentality.

What, they have Cloudflare and we don't? We also must have cloudflare. Don't ask why.

Now that you have it, you are at least level 15 and not a peasant.

Same applies to every braindead framework on the web. The gadget mind of the bois is the cause for all this.