A lot of people just stick cloudflare in front of anything because of cargo cultism.
A $5/mo VPS can serve a blog to tens of thousands of people unless you are running something stupidly inefficient. If it’s a static blog make that hundreds of thousands. For millions you might need to splurge on the $10 or $20 per month VPS.
You can either spend $5 per month for VPS for a webserver for your static blog which you now have to secure properly, or you can just stick it on Cloudflare Pages for free
Cloudflare bot protection adds a slight delay (as in seconds) at best, and completely blocks users like the parent comment at worst. It costs no money, but isn't free either.
We are talking about different products though, I believe you can have your webpage hosted on Cloudflare Pages or behind Cloudflare CDN without enabling invasive "bot" detection.
A $5/mo VPS can serve a blog to tens of thousands of people unless you are running something stupidly inefficient. If it’s a static blog make that hundreds of thousands. For millions you might need to splurge on the $10 or $20 per month VPS.