> A lot of self-hosters running CF tunnels because they don't know better also contributes.

Are you saying CF documentation is better than Computer Science / Networking education resources? Why don't people know better? I thought the tunnels are mostly used to bypass NAT's.

> Static blogs hiding behind bot protection

I'm not sure what is the proportion of the static vs dynamic sites, but I would argue that for wordpress CF is adding real value.

> I thought the tunnels are mostly used to bypass NAT's.

While not free, you can do with with TCP HAProxy streams on a cheap VPS. A lot of people using them to bypass NAT don't realise that Cloudflare decrypt the traffic on the way - that's what I meant about them not knowing better.