> what is cloudflare exactly?

Man-in-the-middle and gatekeeper of (large parts of) the web.

It's getting harder and harder to participate online without being subject to their surveillance and/or approval.

Cloudflare is, believe it or not, the owner of several IP blocked by Telefonica in Spain durong football matches. Soon to be tennis, basket, too.

Just a cloud dev infrastructure provider like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.