Yes, the internet is much bigger than it was in 2003, and it needs more complex protective tools. The fact that you haven't noticed cloudflare when it is working is a sign that it is, well, working.

And the fact that your favorite sites aren't down more often is yet another sign. Downtime due to DDOS attacks alone would be so much greater without cloudflare than downtime due to cloudflare currently is. Your perspective is a pure lack of knowledge and an excess of confirmation bias.

Have you ever self hosted a website? Was that a modern website, or just a bunch of text? Are you experienced with uptime SLAs on multiple services? Have you ever had to deal with a DDOS attack?

There are lots of things that Cloudflare does that requires experience and knowledge to notice or understand. And it isn't even the biggest single point of failure when it comes to the Internet. When AWS has an outage for instance there is a huge chunk of the Internet that goes down.

There are problems with the centralization of the Internet. But this happened for a reason, and it has been so long and these services have been so reliable that people don't even realize what it was like before.

You are very difficult to respect.

I've been using the intermet since 2003

Then you should remember this: https://youtu.be/48rz8udZBmQ?si=81BQVmYGYRhpPCsw