You brought up Cloudflare, when in reality this site went into their caching services configuration and purposefully enabled geofencing restrictions. They could have done this a million ways, and Cloudflare is basically irrelevant to this conversation, and is utterly fungible.

>What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible

Because you don't want the burden of far away users who will never represent a penny of income for your content? This is a weirdly entitled comment.

Quite aside from certain countries disproportionately account for malicious traffic, often there are legal issues that come into play as well. This is why many regional sites block EU locations because they don't want the compliance costs for users that aren't their base.