Of course it's using cdn/Cloudflare. I live in the Caribbean. Good thing it was! A topic such as Home Lab will see traffic from all over globally. No cdn would be terrible idea.

Not sure of you are located but Pingdom test for 404 does not match your claim: https://tools.pingdom.com/#5ca8d73c1e400000

And of course 404 pages will be slower. Because Cloudflare still has to receive the request first, then check origin server roundtrip before responding.

The site is just a hobby page and the only thing public facing that I self hosted. Even my main blog which is hosted in North America uses full-page-cache CDN courtesy Bunnycdn.