For an article that claims to know Cloudflare, I don't think he does.

Cloudflare build from the bottom up. First the SDN ( Software Defined Network), then the products on top. The first one was logical: CDN + DDOS.

All the rest continued to build on top of the SDN - Workers, D1, ... But once they have the full stack ( which happened arround D1), it was time to let others build on top of Cloudflare.

That's the current stage ( Cloud 2.0), that was always the goal. It's even in their ticker ( NET ).

In practise, AI could be a godsend. A total new foundation for software where the Cloudflare stack is a perfect product fit( disposable compute, where others will protect their compute with long running compute contracts). I can't blame them to try to seize the opportunity.

Tbh. I feels like the author hasn't actually adjusted to how Cloudflare is building it's cloud ( eg. how powerfull Durable Objects is).

PS. A big outage is a long time ago... ( we use them, I remember the issues those days and the post mortem, a lot became more stable as far as I noticed).