A Handful of Companies Rule the Internet with DDoS Mitigation

Agree cloudflair has a free tier that will get You far enough for most hobby projects.

Secondly "The few competitors to Cloudflare are either very expensive enterprise company-to-company providers, or some guys in Russia" ... Or this is not something anyone doing anything "mostly lawfull" has to worry about much? The hyper scalers / cloud providers package this in so you don't normally think about it