TL;DR: Also off topic.

20 years ago I was beta testing a browser nobody's heard of and happened upon a mainstream PC accessories seller like pcconnection.com or the original cdw.com with a poorly designed site: malformed cookies, important information hidden inside nonstandard tooltips, etc. Don't recall their name, but they had domains for the US and Canada. I emailed them at least twice to point this out, but they blew me off. I was amused when they went out of business a few years later.

When you criticise Cloudflare, the common response is that the site owner has chosen to block this or that. I don't believe for a moment that Cloudflare offers a checkbox for "Spin the busy animation forever, never loading the site and never generating an error". This is what happens when a company dubs itself the Internet Police while not knowing what the f*ck they're doing. In the words of the Joshua AI from Wargames

"The only winning move is not to play."

I suggest that it's impossible to do what Cloudflare is attempting without false positives, but they haven't figured that out yet. And when you complain in their public forum, do they apologize and send up the flares? No, you're met with arrogance:

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/browser-integrity-check-b...

I wasn't caught in this particular dragnet, but had the same thing happen to me this past winter with the Iceraven browser. I did complain to one of the affected sites, who weren't particularly helpful, and the issue disappeared on its own about 2 months later. Maybe somebody did start a public thread with Cloudflare, but knowing the likely response, I held off restarting that fight.

I use the Opera Mini browser sometimes (not recommended), which apparently has its worldwide server/endpoint in the Netherlands. There used to be a US endpoint but no longer. If you're using Cloudflare to block European traffic for one reason or another, okay, I get it. If you're using Cloudflare to block "unusual traffic" like VPN endpoints (no idea how it actually works), it would take them two minutes to do a reverse lookup on the IP and see

109.211.145.82.in-addr.arpa. 13531 IN PTR h18-05-12.opera-mini.net

and simply whitelist the IP globally. But they haven't...while a little voice nags at me, reminding me this is supposed to be their day job.

On some level I'm okay with the status quo and letting my first paragraph scenario play out: smart businesses grow while idiots go bankrupt. With Chrome, Safari, and Edge controlling roughly 90% of the browser market, though, I'm not holding my breath. The rest of me considers this behavior anti-competitive and a growing civil rights issue. Imagine needing a toll road or ferry service to get somewhere but the owner tells you they don't like your car and please get another one. The average person would exclaim, "What? There's nothing wrong with my car!!" Ditto for whatever browser I choose. If it supports TLS 1.3 but doesn't like the web site's HTML/JavaScript/CSS, then maybe I'll consider switching...or maybe I won't. But that should be my choice, not theirs, and definitely not the choice of a middleman with delusions of grandeur. Web sites designed for use by the public need to be accessible by the public.