A pre-funding project I am working will achieve DDoS resilience without gatekeepers like Cloudflare, if I am able to bring it to market.

It turns out that there's actually a ton of academic research on a number of very promising techniques, in addition to the approaches I'm hoping to develop.

I see the issue more as UI/UX/ease of use/cost of adoption. Right now a lot of approaches you could probably defend a Ph.D. on the topic. They need to instead become approaches developers choose because it's the easiest and most cost-effective way to deliver a high-quality service.