> Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing

What ridiculous statement.

Or CF could just do better caching, which was their original reason for existence.

CF is not magic, they have limits too. What's the point of serving cached copies to bots while real users experience unavailability?

Unless they're actually dropping the connections with a RST, I wonder how much bots repeatedly hammering at their CAPTCHA pages (which is actually relatively large in comparison to many static sites) costs them, vs. just serving the actual content which could actually be smaller.

The captcha pages are guaranteed to be static while the upstream content could miss the cache at any time.