The old guard has left as they we too much of an expense in this cost-cutting age... without mentors, crap creeps in and now we are seeing what happens when people don't know how things work, are in charge...
It may not be true everywhere, but at my company we 100% had more SEVs after two rounds of RIFs. We are talking simple statistics of SEVs per month plotted against RIFs.
The website you're using right now is hosted from a single location without any kind of CDN in front, so unless by coincidence you happen to live next door then you seem to be managing. CDNs do help, but just not bundling 40MB of Javascript or doing 50 roundtrips to load a page can go a long way.
What is "high latency" nowadays? If people wouldn't bundle 30mb into every html page it wouldn't be needed.
Also cloudflare is needed due to DDOS and abuse from rogue actors, which are mostly located in specific areas. Residential IP ranges in democratic countries are not causing the issues.
Of course they are, but these botnets are actively combated by the ISPs.
The main bad traffic that I receive comes from server IP ranges all over the world and several rogue countries who think it makes sense to wage hybrid war against us. But residential IP ranges are not the majority of bad traffic.
I would even say that residential IP ranges are most of the paying customers for companies, and if you just block everything else you most likely wouldn't need to use cloudflare.
Unfortunately firewall technology is not there yet. It's quite hard to block entire countries, even harder to block any non-residential ASN. And then you can still add some open source "i am human" captcha solution before you need to use cloudflare.
That stupid Cloudflare check page often adds latency in orders of magnitude compared to what a few thousand miles of cables would. Also most applications and websites are not that sensitive to latency anyway, at least when done properly.
They might go on a hiring freeze, cancel a role, or in some cases pass on someone asking too much... But I don't think any major players are actively out trawling for "cheap and dumb". Certainly not Cloudflare, AWS and Google.