While I agree with your assessment that Cloudflare serves as a modern firewall, I disagree with your assessment of disingenuousness. My lament was mainly at the

While I agree with your assessment that Cloudflare serves as a modern firewall, I disagree with your assessment of disingenuousness. My lament was mainly at the more robotic and/or malicious "auditors" and "compliance officers" who will mark one or more line items as a critical failure if you don't have one or more Cisco Firepower/Juniper SRX/Fortinet Fortigate/Meraki MX/Barracuda NG/etc in your network such that its position in the network diagram means that it protects you from Evil Hackers. And AFAIK, while cloudflare's service is a sort of firewall, they don't use any traditional layer 4, layer 7, or 'next-generation' firewall appliances to get that result.