I find this kind of funny in a sad way. What does the marketting team have to do with this? This should go directly to the law people in the company and to the engineering team, who fixes it as quickly as possible. Does the law need to be validated first by the marketting team at cloudflare? If they have had any say in how this process works, then they f'ed it up already, breaking the law! Basically being Internet criminals. Might even be intentional to drive their number games.
Not sure how it is at your company, but at most companies marketing email is almost entirely handled by...marketing. Their email service provider should have provided review and guidance on the preferences page.
This is not about the e-mail itself, but the pages, which are supposed to let you unsubscribe and their way of functioning. Of course it would be best to have a single click link in the e-mail, but even that would require some kind of API in the system. I doubt the marketing department has people working on those systems.
Those are usually handled by the email service provider. Email deliverability is a speciality in itself, something even a company as tech-savvy as Cloudflare probably doesn't have the skills in-house.
Properly handling opt-outs is part of it. MailChimp does the right thing by soliciting feedback, including the option "I never signed up for these emails", hopefully that goes into whatever scoring mechanism they use to kick out abusive customers. Sadly the current state of what passes for front-end development is abysmal, with pages often not working if a user has cookies or javascript disabled, or an ad-blocker.
As for JGC, he deserves credit for doing the right thing, but that does not change the fact his company violated the law, and their marketing department richly deserves any fire and brimstone is raining down their necks right now. I would say most companies should probably have their email service provider contracts controlled by legal rather than marketing, most marketing departments have an inherent conflict of interest in this regard.
