If they settled the trolls would just keep coming.
If they fight the patent extortion then trolls are going to think twice before suing them, for fear of losing .
They were also getting sued regularly, by patent trolls.
They had really good lawyers, and had a basic policy, to never settle with trolls. It wasn't altruistic. They just didn't want to get bullied. I'm sure that they also went after other companies, and there was probably a lot of wheeling and dealing. That's one of the reasons that corporations like to hoard patents.
They used to require their engineers to file a couple of patents a year. I am on a patent. I got a dollar for it.
It's likely that over the lifetime of the patent, the total cost would have been more than the cost to fight it, and as the a sibling pointed out, settling begets more suits + settlements. It adds up fast.
This isn't Cloudflare being "good," it's in their best interest to fight frivolous suits.
Most of tech is firmly in their villain phase and has been for years, its dollars over everything. Even ycombinator backed Stripe supports hate groups as a payment processor see: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-and-tech
While I agree with moving against bad actors on the internet, it's not CloudFlares role to play the censor. Let's be real, legislators and law enforcement already have the tools available to move against these type of platforms and pushing corporations into censorship gives me the same kind of vibes like when politicians ask for ever increasing (and useless) surveillance and empowerment in law enforcement capabilities.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/swat...