Ok, so grant for the moment that it’s both the largest conspiracy ever and the best kept secret ever.
How is anyone worse off using their OHTTP gateway than not using it? Is the idea that CF is this spectacular conspiracy, but nobody thought of capturing traffic from backbones?
Cloudflare Proxy, which is required for their ddos protection - and which as I recall accounts for like half of internet traffic - handles TLS termination at CF servers.
When you capture traffic at internet backbones, which the NSA does (Room 641A), you don't get to middle-man the encrypted traffic. Cloudflare gets access to unencrypted traffic, because they act as the TLS termination.
Most companies take this trade-off because "we can trust cloudflare", or "the data isn't that important, and besides it's encrypted the rest of the way anyway."