Cloudflare obfuscating such a huge segment of origin servers gives a privacy advantage to anyone using a private DNS, since most of the IPs you can be seen connecting to are just…Cloudflare.
We talk about end to end encryption all the time, but half the web is hosted by a single company with questionable ethics and everyone is like, we trust them! They write technical blog posts!
Even Signal is hosted on Cloudflare...
For example, see
https://gfw.report/blog/gfw_esni_blocking/en/
But SNI is not CH and ESNI is not ECH
Will China block ECH
ECH blocking has been detected in Russia
https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/417
According to Niere et al. (2025)
"Additionally, with the ECH extension not yet being widely used [17], [71] and focusing on privacy protection rather than censorship circumvention [60], it can be censored easily by blocking it entirely [14], [76]."
The paper describes various GFW bypass methods that currently work, including removing the SNI extension entirely
It does not mention anyone using ECH to bypass GFW
Perhaps it is too early to conclude "China blocks ECH" because ECH is not in widespread use
I'm just suggesting that there are trade-offs involved and value gained by making private origin servers common.