It’s not that simple. You’re right that many places have compliance policies but that’s not all, or even most, of the benefit. WAFs are useful any time you don’

It’s not that simple. You’re right that many places have compliance policies but that’s not all, or even most, of the benefit. WAFs are useful any time you don’t have a team of experienced 24x7 engineers who have complete control and knowledge of each and every application on your network, which isn’t the case for any large organization. When things like log4j come out, it’s really nice to be able to have a vendor like Cloudflare or AWS deploy a single rule off-hours which will cover all of your public facing services, especially when some of them are not your own code or hard to deploy. It’s one thing if a patch is a single line change pushed out in your CD pipeline than if it’s “beg the vendor for an update, get an emergency CAB approved, and follow the 97 step Word document”.