Even we quite often use Cloud flare. Those who resisted at first often changed their mind after getting hit with bot scraping DNS attacks. It's not trivially easy to deploy alternatives.
Counterpoint: people used to be able to search for things. Now, SEO decides what the public is served by that process. Even though the people of Reddit offered the information freely, and also curated freely by volunteer moderators, it doesn't serve the monetization interests to simply hand over that free information without an additional charge. (and here on the Threadiverse we'd rather argue about whether all people in Western civilizations should be killed) So yeah, an act of absolute desperation.
Perhaps the best ones?
It does incur quite the cost though, if only in initial set-up time, so I can see where some people may have a desire to avoid it, for a time.