Cloudflare sends certain users they think are bots into infinite captcha loops - the wrong user agent or tor endpoint can do it

Yes, it's unfortunate that a network service provider whose primary business model is checks notes preventing network abuse would try to detect and prevent abuse via various heuristics such as captchas.

I also agree that Cloudflare should get all the blame here, since none of their customers voluntarily chose to use them, and Cloudflare doesn't give their customers a huge variety of options for bot detection sensitivity.

Matt Prince personally kidnaps CTOs and waterboards them until they agree to use Cloudflare, and the thousands of configuration options and rule combinations on the WAF are just for show - customers can't actually use them.

What an evil, evil company.

It's the same people who believe software has no settings.

I assume this is only on sites that are on Cloudflare though. Or, no?

True, but a lot of sites use Cloudflare. It's sometimes very unexpected sites as well, both very large ones and very small ones.

The realistic right now worry is that you'll fall afoul of Cloudflare's bot checking and they just won't connect you through to your destination.

The potential future worry would be if cloudflare decide they don't like the article or you for some other reason, they can refuse to connect you.

These do both rely on your traffic being routed through Cloudflare's servers, but a LOT of traffic is

You have never been banned by Cloudflare because of the wrong shape of your skull? You must be living in the US probably.