For better or worse, the free plan that Cloudflare has provided me for 10 years for my 20-30 hobby/personal domains has gotten them several hundred thousand dollars in business.

indeed, typically by using their huge cash piles to build a moat around them, so no small new player has a dream of competing.

This is why I refuse to give any money to AWS/GCP/Azure or anyone who runs on them.

You should avoid giving them money because they're 50 times more expensive than the competition, not because of that.

I'm pretty sure that's impossible nowadays, at least avoiding everything that runs on AWS.