By the fiftieth “your browser is outdated, please upgrade to an up to date browser” on an up to date version of Firefox, but with privacy extensions and on a VPN, yeah forgive me if I harbour some resentment

Interesting! I used Firefox for ages and never encountered that issue.

The VPN "click to confirm you're human" is annoying but at the same time understandable - 60% of all Internet traffic is bots.

Not even a captcha challenge half the time, just “you’re not worthy of seeing this website, peasant.” And don’t even think about disabling JS, that gets you blacklisted all the same.

Super weird. I'm using Mullvad Browser half the time, never had any such issues. It automatically kills all cookies, has uBlock and NoScript installed, etc. EDIT: oh, yeah, it's also Firefox-based.

They also block you from loading standalone images, so you can’t download images from search results or even open an image from an article in a new tab

What...? I do that literally every day - I handle the service catalogue at work so I need a lot of icons for the hardware and software we provide to users. Just yesterday I downloaded the images for a bunch of Apple hardware, straight from the search results.

Should I be grateful that they’re saving the website megabytes of server traffic while making it impossible to save stuff offline or use the browser’s zoom tools to get information out of a high resolution image?

Other than the fact that I fail to see that "impossible to save stuff" bit - yeah, you should, somewhat. Again: over 60% of traffic is bots, that generates A LOT of traffic. These days a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford hosting a website if they didn't have services that Cloudflare and similar companies offer.

Also, they’re literally a man in the middle as a service (...)

I don't know enough about networking to have an opinion on that. I only know that the two network security companies that I follow on socials recommend them. And it's not "shills shilling", these are two companies that will take governments and companies to court for threatening user rights.

Also also, just because they say their DNS service is “private” doesn’t make it private. Companies have been lying about their privacy policy since privacy policies started being mandated with zero consequences

Sure, I get that. But I'm a fan of Occam's Razor. Can they exfiltrate data from their DNS? Of course. Everybody can. But why would they? If anyone finds out, it effectively kills the entire company, and they don't do business with personal data - that's Google's market. It's a lot of risk for zero reward, the way I see it.