Hey, repo poster here. The requirements are if one wishes to be able to follow all the directions completely. Depending on your drivers you may or may not want Cloudflare. Some advantages of Cloudflare are privacy (hiding your actual server IP (if you proxy all the addresses,)) caching (if you expect a lot of traffic,) nice API control of name server functions, and it's free. But, you trade that for unencrypted man in the middle, certainly an understandable deal-breaker for certain situations. Cloudflare can be skipped and your domain mapped directly to your edge server IP using your registrar dns panel.

Good to know and that part should be clarified in the readme so that upon skimming it's clear that cloudflare is optional.

Good idea. Done.