First, let’s set aside the separate question of whether monopolies are bad. They are not good but that’s not the issue here.
As to architecture:
Cloudflare has had some outages recently. However, what’s their uptime over the longer term? If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.
But there’s a more interesting argument in favour of the status quo.
Assuming cloudflare’s uptime is above average, outages affecting everything at once is actually better for the average internet user.
It might not be intuitive but think about it.
How many Internet services does someone depend on to accomplish something such as their work over a given hour? Maybe 10 directly, and another 100 indirectly? (Make up your own answer, but it’s probably quite a few).
If everything goes offline for one hour per year at the same time, then a person is blocked and unproductive for an hour per year.
On the other hand, if each service experiences the same hour per year of downtime but at different times, then the person is likely to be blocked for closer to 100 hours per year.
It’s not really bad end user experience that every service uses cloudflare. It’s more-so a question of why is cloudflare’s stability seeming to go downhill?
And that’s a fair question. Because if their reliability is below average, then the value prop evaporates.
To me this reads as a form of misdirection, intentional or not. A monopolist has little reason to care about downstream effects, since customers have nowhere else to turn. Framing this as roll your own versus Cloudflare rather than as a monoculture CDN environment versus a diverse CDN ecosystem feels off.
That said, the core problem is not the monopoly itself but its enablers, the collective impulse to align with whatever the group is already doing, the desire to belong and appear to act the "right way", meaning in the way everyone else behaves. There are a gazillion ways of doing CDN, why are we not doing them? Why the focus on one single dominant player?
I don’t the answer to the all questions. But here I think it is just a way to avoid responsibility. If someone choses CDN “number 3” and it goes down, business people *might* put a blame on this person for not choosing “the best”. I am not saying it is a right approach, I just seen it happens too many times.