Yeah, I'm not seeing much evidence of the allegations in this article. CloudFlare would be very, very stupid to have set up a cache stampede of the sort OP describes, and they don't use cURL as the user agent (https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172556-W...).

I kinda wonder if someone's using https://workers.cloudflare.com/ to crawl their site daily. Or they just need to configure `ngx_http_realip_module` to get the originating user's IP address, if they're not currently processing the X-Forwarded-For header.