Cloudflare isn't an impartial, neutral network. People need to stop perpetuating this fig leaf.

To the outside world, Cloudflare acts as a host. Their servers serve the content fo whatever site is in their "network". It doesn't matter that some of those sites are being partially pulled from other backend servers that are outside their network again. Cloudflare is their service provider and they are their customer (free or not).

This is especially true with all their hosted stuff now like Workers, R2, etc., but don't let that muddy the discussion. Even without that they cache and serve the content.