Out of curiosity, how do you become ‘exceedingly good’ at serving static HTML?

By all accounts, they’ve centralised the delivery of this static HTML at several layers of the network stack, and you’re not getting static HTML anymore because some other part of the business fucked it up.

The World Wide Web was serving static HTML for decades before Cloudflare came along. Open an FTP client, drag and drop, and boom - new HTMl is served.

When we talk static HTML I think that still includes images, stylesheets and potentially even very basic javascript (e.g. setting classes). Those take advantage of CDNs; Cloudflare have an extensive CDN with decent latency / locations. They also are a DNS registrar and a lot of people use them for their local DNS provider so again latency benefits. That's before we talk about the DDoS protection, injecting stuff like metrics etc etc. I don't want to sound like a Cloudflare rep here but I can see where this user is coming from.