Not sure that actually follows. I could say "the open web can't possibly win, Cloudflare just has too many resources compared to any individual site" just as well, and it would sound similarly reasonable but is probably an equally poor prediction.

You just need to make it "difficult enough". If the energy/processing costs of bypassing Cloudflare is high, then it doesn't scale up to a distributed domestic IP scrape of my million page website.

The rest of the world is not in a tight alliance against Cloudflare though.