I'm still in the habit of granting Cloudflare a presumption of good faith. Developers frequently make assumptions about things like browsers that can cause problems like this. Something somewhere gets over-optimized, or someone somewhere does some 80/20 calculation, or something gets copy-pasted or (these days) produced by an LLM. There are plenty of reasons why this might be entirely unintentional, or that the severity of the impacts of a change were underestimated.
I agree that this exposes the risk of relying overmuch on handful of large, opaque, unaccountable companies. And as long as Cloudflare's customers are web operators (rather than users), there isn't a lot of incentive for them to be concerned about the user if their customers aren't.
One idea might be to approach web site operators who use Cloudflare and whose sites trigger these captchas more than you'd like. Explain the situation to the web site operator. If the web site operator cares enough about you, they might complain to Cloudflare. And if not, well, you have your answer.
I agree that this exposes the risk of relying overmuch on handful of large, opaque, unaccountable companies. And as long as Cloudflare's customers are web operators (rather than users), there isn't a lot of incentive for them to be concerned about the user if their customers aren't.
One idea might be to approach web site operators who use Cloudflare and whose sites trigger these captchas more than you'd like. Explain the situation to the web site operator. If the web site operator cares enough about you, they might complain to Cloudflare. And if not, well, you have your answer.