Really cool of you to gather this feedback and take on board! 
Cloudflare
- What goals do you have that proxying to Netlify helps you accomplish?
Proxying:
- Email Address Obfuscation
- Reduce bandwidth on Netlify, especially in case of unexpected traffic spikes or bot activity. As a student hosting a personal site, I can’t afford surprise extra bandwidth charges from Netlify, and Cloudflare helps reduce this, for free, with no bandwidth limit of its own. Also have a friend using a video background on his Netlify site, so reducing Netlify bandwidth usage is even more important with high bandwidth items like these. In the case of images, while Netlify does offer lossless compression, I often want to offer at least an option for an original version to my visitors, too, again using bandwidth.
Hosting external DNS (even without proxying):
- DNSSEC
- Point root domain somewhere other than www
- Avoiding wildcard certificates being issued
- Are you accomplishing what you set out to with this configuration?
Haven’t finished setting up yet, but looking good so far.
- Did you have to configure anything at your other CDN provider in order for proxying to Netlify to work for you?
As Netlify doesn’t provision the Let’s Encrypt cert when proxied to, I need to set a Cloudflare Origin Certificate as my custom certificate on Netlify, as I want to stick with using the Full (Strict) HTTPS mode on Cloudflare for maximum security.