In what way am I the product when using CloudFlare’s free tier?

I realize the name of the game is to protect as much of your data as possible, however, unless you have your own ISP/backbone, you are, at some point, the product. I utilize the evil Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust. For last month, I used 375.28 GiB. I don’t run the 'arr stack tho. I do, however, stream my own audio collection via Navidrome. I have had zero issues with the evil Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust, except for a brief pause while Cloudflare had some issues last month. Other than that, smooth sailing. I also have tailscale as an overlay on the server and on the stand alone pfsense firewall, which has a very robust set of rules and heavy filtering going on.

Is there another way

There are always other ways. Pangolin, et al. It just depends on you, and what you want to put in to get out of it all. If you are going this route, investigate a WAF like Crowdsec, or similar, and you might want to look at pfsense or opnsense.