This pearl clutching is getting out of control. The existence of cloudflare is totally orthogonal to your ability to self-host content on the internet. They don't have any power, except over their customers and those customers customers. If you don't want to use them, then don't. No one is stopping you.
I would almost argue the contrary: Cloudflare makes self-hosting more possible, when you're going up against the large cloud hosting empires like Amazon and Google and Microsoft. You may not be hosting on one of those, but you can slap a little Cloudflare in front of yours to give your own server similar levels of robustness... and you can always turn it back off if they ever become a problem, since you aren't using proprietary APIs and services to power your server.
If anything, I've kinda been hoping Cloudflare would realize self-hosting and decentralization is what they should be supporting and pushing, as it's when using their CDN makes the most sense. And obviously, Amazon and Google and Microsoft all have their own CDN capabilities, so the less people using their cloud services, the better for Cloudflare.
Yes. Agreed. But if not Cloudflare as a pushback alternative to those trying to own the internet, then who?
It seems to me the "standard internet" is getting smaller and smaller. What other options do we have?