> Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s

Unrelated, but these mega actors sometimes have such shiny cables, because they can route on their internal network across the globe. Iirc Cloudflare does that for some/all traffic(?). But you’re right, all else equal more hops = worse, and I’d be unsurprised if Cloudflare overstates the benefits of using them.

If the site is both static and busy enough, then the majority of users never need to do a roundtrip to the original server.

If the site isn’t busy enough… well, I think more CDNs ought to support pre-caching. Supposedly Vercel does?

> Unless CloudFlare cables are somehow shinier than the rest of the internet’s, adding one hop almost certainly adds latency. More hops more time.

In my experience, CloudFlare (and other CDNs) can often provide a better route then a regular ISP. Sometimes downloading speed is really slow, switching to CloudFlare wrap (VPN) can at least double or triple the speed.

You're not factoring in the DDoS protection, that's why the answer you got is so clear. It _may_ still be value negative, but it probably depends on the tradeoffs one cares about.