[JackSlateur]

  Cloudflare chooses to hide thousands of IPs on a single IP - this is a technical choice, not a system necessity.

Well, if you want "CDN", then you must break the TCP connection. That is, you must have one TCP connection from client to CDN, and then one from CDN to the backend.

Unless you are against CDNs (they do serve a real-world purpose, tho), then it is a system necessity;