Your experience is a bit unusual. We saw measurable improvement from edge caching. Argo routing gave us about 200ms back on TTFB where we thought it was worthwhile. We could of course set up our own edge caching with another provider (we also use Cloudfront a lot), but that doesn’t make Cloudflare bad for providing the same service. Similarly, Cloudflare isn’t bad if they provide a fast DNS alternative to Google’s fast DNS—and the mix of features isn’t identical.