That's the impression I get from Cloudflare - it seems like a group of highly skilled people attempting to solve real problems for the benefit of the web as a whole. As both a paid business user and a free user for home projects, I deeply appreciate what they've accomplished and how generously they allow unpaid users to benefit from their work.

I worry about what happens someday when leadership changes and the priority becomes value extraction rather than creation, if that makes sense. We've seen it so many times with so many other tech companies, it's difficult to believe it won't happen to Cloudflare at some point.

You are probably right that this is not the case right now. 25 years ago you could say the same about google employees. Incentives change with time, and once infrastructure is in place it's nearly impossible to get rid of it again.

So one better makes sure that it has not the potential to further introduce gatekeepers, where later such gatekeepers will realize that, in order to continue to live, they need to make a profit over everything else, and then everything is out of the window.

Unfortunately, even if it is as you describe, human nature is such that it will not stay that way forever. Likely not even for long.

And then 20 years later Cloudflare hits hard times and gets bought by someone you don't like. The problem is that much power concentrated in any one place.