I’d just like to know what your solution to DDOS and other bad actors is if it’s not cloudflare.

First of all DDoS from Tor is rarely successful because the Tor network itself does not have the bandwidth with so few exit nodes. But if nonetheless you have an attack from Tor you stand up an onion host and forward all Tor traffic from the clearnet site to the onion site. Then regardless of where the attack is coming from, on the clearnet side there are various tar-pitting techniques to use on high-volume suspect traffic. You can also stand up a few VPS servers and load balance them, similar to what Cloudflare does without selling everyone else’s soul to the US tech giant devil.

on something cloudflare already does extremely well.

CF does the job very poorly. The problem is you’re discounting availability to all users as a criteria. You might say #SpamHaus solves the spam problem “very well” if you neglect the fact that no one can any longer run their own home server on a residential IP and that it’s okay for mail to traverse the likes of Google & MS. A good anti-spam tool detects the spam without falsely shit-canning ham. This is why SpamHaus and Cloudflare do a poor job: they marginalize whole communities and treat their ham as spam.

A walled garden means there’s actual barriers to entry. Cloudflare isn’t a barrier to entry unless you’re planning to attack an instance

Yes to your first statement. Your 2nd statement is nonsense. The pic on the OP proves I hit a barrier to entry without “planning an attack”

or are using something like ToR

Tor users are only one legit community that Cloudflare marginalizes. People in impoverished areas have to use cheap ISPs who issue CGNAT IP addresses, which CF is also hostile toward. CF is also bot-hostile, which includes hostility toward beneficial bots as well as non-bots who appear as bots to CF’s crude detection (e.g. text browsers).