> No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.

Cloudflare with their "checking if the site connection is secure" (while being MITM) is another example.

To a degree, sure, but is it really 'MITM' if the site you are trying to visit has chosen to add cloudflare into the middle?

You may as well say all load-balancers are MITM because you might connect to a different host on each attempt and there's a man in the middle influencing your connection.

What makes it any different if the website executed the same logic cloudflare is on their own box?

The second I see that awful Cloudflare countdown I blacklist the site and never return.

I am convinced all their metrics saying they reduce bot traffic are mistaken for the fact that they reduce all traffic by annoying users away.