There is rarely a good reason to use cloudflare […] By using cloudflare, you surrender your digital sovereignty for a mirage of convenience and safety.

Heh, man you have no idea how bad the DDoS attacks are without some form of protection. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Cloudflare, but if you’re putting up a public-facing website that you want people to be able to access, you absolutely need some DDoS protection service. You need someone to detect large-scale malicious traffic and offload it before it hits your system. It’s no mirage. Arch has been under attack for days. DDoS-for-hire is a profitable criminal enterprise.

Self-hosting a bot-interference tool like Anubis does nothing to help with DDoS attacks. You need a high-bandwidth shield that can absorb the incoming connection requests, filter out the legitimate users and dump the rest, and that means a CDN.