The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

I would love to get off Cloudflare but there are no real good alternatives

Writing backends that can actually handle public traffic and using authentication for expensive resources are fantastic alternatives.

Also, cheaply rate limiting malicious web clients should be something that is trivial to accomplish with competent web tooling (i.e., on your own servers). If this seems out of scope or infeasible, you might be using the wrong tools for the job.