It isn't an extra import tax, just enforcement of VAT that was always a requirement (and always happened if you used a courier like UPS or DHL rather than the post office). Some countries have minimums however, but that will be removed in the EU in the future.
It goes to show how badly it is set up for a false alarm. In a real emergency all the primary functions would go up (taking over radio broadcasts for example) so there wouldn't be the same problem. It is still bad of course because of the "cry wolf" factor.
I don't use CloudFlare nor have any interest in them, but I don't see the arrogance. The issues CloudFlare have are things everyone takes seriously and are working very hard on. Deployment and memory safety are hard problems that happens to the best of the best. It happens Google, Amazon and Facebook. If anything the idea that this would damaging, because it is more public, is arrogant. If CloudFlare would be saying that everything is fine you might have a point, but they aren't. Just like the other companies mentioned they seem to be improving their routines, programming and infrastructure to try and mitigate these problems.
What they are criticising however are things like not adopting new protocols or not taking things that affects everyone seriously. This isn't something that would happen if people were trying. And the response from some of the industry is "we know what we are doing", and shortly after the same thing happens again and again and again.
So I don't really see CloudFlare being that arrogant, if anything it's the "you are not better than us" from some parts of the industry that is. The day I see CloudFlare not trying I would be happy calling them arrogant. But if anything I would caution that they are too successful by trying more than most.
AD isn't just for Windows, which would be weird since it is mostly a fancy key value store (with associated functions and services of course). SSSD for example can use AD. The problem is that Linux itself doesn't support the same functionality client side, which using a configuration manager doesn't really solve. And question wasn't if you have used AD, but if you have managed Linux desktop deployments without it. Since your claim is that it is better.