I am not an expert, and my tiny website carries no advertising, but I get the impression that Cloudflare is trying to supplant Google as Internet Gatekeeper rather than acting as a guardian angel for =>big<= content creators.

For one thing, Google has been scraping website content for a long time, well before the advent of AI; the Schema project was launched 15 years ago by Bing, Google, and Yahoo. To achieve a good ranking in search results, webmasters had to rewrite almost all their content to make it understandable to Google's computer systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema.org

Back in 2015, Google also partnered with big content creators like Twitter to replicated their content. The concept was quite similar to what Cloudflare is proposing today. Publishers eventually left in droves two years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

Furthermore, the fundamental question is: who controls access to the Web now, Google or Cloudflare?

Neither option is truly satisfactory. If Cloudflare ultimately comes out on top, the scenario will repeat itself: the company will seek to extract more revenue from its partners, who will eventually leave.