Cloudflare obfuscating such a huge segment of origin servers gives a privacy advantage to anyone using a private DNS, since most of the IPs you can be seen connecting to are just…Cloudflare.
For example, see
https://gfw.report/blog/gfw_esni_blocking/en/
But SNI is not CH and ESNI is not ECH
Will China block ECH
ECH blocking has been detected in Russia
https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/417
According to Niere et al. (2025)
"Additionally, with the ECH extension not yet being widely used [17], [71] and focusing on privacy protection rather than censorship circumvention [60], it can be censored easily by blocking it entirely [14], [76]."
The paper describes various GFW bypass methods that currently work, including removing the SNI extension entirely
It does not mention anyone using ECH to bypass GFW
Perhaps it is too early to conclude "China blocks ECH" because ECH is not in widespread use
We talk about end to end encryption all the time, but half the web is hosted by a single company with questionable ethics and everyone is like, we trust them! They write technical blog posts!
Even Signal is hosted on Cloudflare...
I'm just suggesting that there are trade-offs involved and value gained by making private origin servers common.
Number one reason why Tor is dead is Cloudflare.
Let me digress here. In my opinion, Cloudflare does a lot more censoring than all state actors combined, because they singlehandedly decide if the IP you use is "trustworthy" or "not", and if they decided it is not, you're cut off from like half of the Internet, and the only thing you can do is to look for another one. I'd really like if their engineers understood what Orwellian mammoth have they created and resign, but for now they're only bragging without the realization. Or at least if any sane antitrust or comms agency shred their business in pieces.
And Cloudflare by default makes browsing with Tor unusable. Either you're stuck with endless captchas, or you're banned outright.
Number two reason why Tor is dead is all other antifraud protections combined. Try paying with Stripe through Tor. There is quite a big chance you'll get an "unknown error" of sorts on Stripe side. Try to watch Netflix in Tor - exit nodes are banned.
Everyone kept shouting "Tor bad, Tor for criminals", and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's really hard to do just browse web normally in Tor, because all "normal" sites consider it bad. The "wrong" sites, however, who expect Tor visitors...