> I have no idea why so many folks think large swaths of the Internet should be reliant on a single company.
I don't think it's really that so many people think Cloudflare should be relied on. It's that Cloudflare generally has a good track record and their basic services are available for free. Actually, I don't know of any service similar to Cloudflare with such a generous free tier.
I think you're underestimating just how many devops and infra people dip into the mainstream tech news and adopt that as their new religion.
I have had multiple conversations with high level individuals about why we should be using CloudFlare so widely and what the fallback is if there is an outtage. Usually it boils down to "because reasons".
Today it's #notmyproblem and life is great.