[judge2020]

You could say the same thing about any CDN - Cloudfront, Fastly, Akamai, etc.

Is it right to say that the only reason Cloudflare is the forefront of this concern is because of their business model of offering the CDN for free, while the others have a much more limited free tier or service or none at all?

[zelphirkalt]

I am almost equally worried about other very popular CDNs. However, being the most used CDN makes some people short-circuit and not think about the dangers any longer Just like with captchas from Google. Many people simply put them onto their websites without ever thinking about that, "because everyone does it". If so many people put stuff behind Cloudflare, then at some point the same kind of people, who put captchas without thinking, will put stuff behind Cloudflare without thinking.

Scripts and other stuff from first party usually seem to me at least more trustworthy than something from a third party. It also saves me the mental step of thinking: "Hmmm, why are there scripts loaded from a third party? Is this some kind of ads stuff?"

If a website does not work without unblocking third party scripts, there is some chance, that I will simply abandon it. When a website's purpose is to inform me about something and I do not see the need for any interactivity, I might also abandon it, if it does not show content without unblocking scripts in general, including first party. Web frameworks, which do not take care of at least presenting something when scripts are not unblocked, thus make a website less trustworthy for me.

[mrspeaker]

If you care about privacy then you SHOULD say the same thing about any CDN. Sucks that there's all this awesome infrastructure that we can't use anymore, but that's the trade off.