Hmm, I don't know where you get that takeaway. For me, it's an edge cache, so it speeds up the internet.

It sits between user and origin, often many hops closer, and serves content cached according to rules set by customer.

When you're a CF customer they send you reports on how much bandwidth origin is saving and for me, historically, it's been most of it.

And they do all of it for free most of the time! There's not a lot of cloud providers that I will endorse highly, but I have only love for Cloudflare.

It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice.

Cache of static content, ie. images, css, js or an static html, the CDNs purpose, to shorten location.

At moment you serve dynamic content, you are literally redirecting the request through an intermediary server (from Cloudflare/Homologous to the original server and come back, they are acting as a proxy).

This results in a slowdown of the internet. In fact, it's easy to tell when a regularly visited site has changed and put Cloudflare in between, because it takes longer to load.

> It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice.

Only if you put extra care trying to hide tracks. But certainly it keeps script kiddies from knowing origin's ip, what it is the only one nice feature.

Datacenters should deal with this, but their passivity over the years seems to know no bounds.

CDN (can't say specifically about Cloudflare but that's true for other) may allow picking faster routes than BGP (BGP tends to optimize cost rather than perf), sometimes better compression than Origin on the path, and fast handshakes at Edge with already hot connections towards Origin.

Edgecomputing can also help accelerating dynamic content.

I believe you that this is your experience, but this is not the case in general. Cloudflare will generally result in a faster experience for a correctly configured setup. That's kind the whole point of using them.