In this case cloudflare was the ddos protection via reverse proxy. That is different from directly hosting the website. No backend servers in this case were ever hosted on clodflare's network.
You are still talking about proxies. You misunderstand what Cloudflare was providing, and you are instead talking about "backend servers hosted on clodflare's network" as if that was ever their offer.
I'm confused by your comment. The issue here is people were mad that cloudflare was providing ddos protection (via reverse proxy). What are you talking about?
