> cloudflare actually decreases performance (by adding an hop when serving dynamic content).

Page load time tends to be dominated by static content.

But even for dynamic content, this isn't necessarily true. Setting up a TLS connection requires multiple network round trips. When using an edge network, those round trips only need to go to the nearest PoP rather than all the way to the server. If the PoP already has connections open to your server (which is probably the case if you have consistent traffic) then the network round trips back to your origin server are avoided, and your dynamic content ends up being served faster.

Additionally, Cloudflare's Argo Smart Routing is often able to route packets across the internet faster than than default network routing, which speeds up the communications between Cloudflare and your origin server.

So it turns out "adding a hop" does not necessarily decrease performance.

(Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.)