I thought Cloudflare had a deliberately manual (and therefore more secure but also more expensive and slower) process for registering domains. Has that changed?
I didn't have much issue with the process, it seemed like any other. A local business is a friend of mine, they were paying too much for too little from their previous web host/dev so I transferred the domain name to CF and ran their WordPress "business card" type site through a static site generator, placed all the files in GitHub, and pointed CF Pages at the repo. Whenever they want to make changes, they spin up the current state of WordPress in LocalWP, make the changes, I run it through the static site generator and push the files to GitHub. Takes them a few hours of messing around to get their content right and takes me 5-15 minutes to jamstack it to GitHub. Free hosting and cheap/simple DNS.
I mean, 99% of the reason to have a domain with Cloudflare is their DNS/WAF/CDN and the options you get from having them at the edge. If CF isn’t handling your DNS they can’t provide those services without some very specific configurations that aren’t for the faint of heart.
You can use anybody as a registrar if you don’t want those tools though. CF sells domains at cost so it’s not something they aren’t making money on.