I remember people arguing on HN over a decade ago about how awful it was that on Google News you wouldn't get direct links, but instead links to their tracking system that would forward you to the story.

Now, they'll even refuse to forward the links unless you do a captcha, and you can't escape from captcha hell unless you accept cookies and you don't forge (or refuse to send) your referer.

We were talking about how most of the internet got locked behind walled gardens, but we didn't notice how much of the "open" internet secretly became a walled garden. Starting with that Facebook like button, Google Analytics, and Google ads everywhere, and culminating in Cloudflare MITMing everything.

aside: One of my personal conspiracy theories is that when the government wants deep activity on a site to be tracked, they DDOS the site until there's no other option than to add Cloudflare.