To me, anything payments related you want to be really super clear as to what you're doing because the consequences of getting it wrong are your income. Instead we have this abomination of a double negative, several turnaries, and no comments.
But there are alternatives to both CloudFlare and android, and CloudFlare has competitors with free tiers that I think are easier to use (I'm one data point)? The problem is people deciding to use CloudFlare or CloudFlare itself?
Not surprising. There's a part of the Shopify careers site that has a letter you have to acknowledge that says (paraphrased): Care more about the ability to sell than what people sell, and if feel you might disagree with what people sell then this isn't the workplace for you. They really drill that point home on the site and in interviews, not surprising their stance is 'no comment'.
Absolutely ran into fake CVs and people farming off the interview to 3rd party interview factories. Not at all surprised this was happening. Can't say I ran into North Koreans but a lot of recruitment agencies were passing people on with little to no vetting. You'd interview someone on camera and they'd be a different person once everything was signed. Given how hard it was to correct that they'd still walk away with a few weeks salary, even in your states with at will contracts it's super difficult to let anyone go.
It's a shortcut for experience, but you lose a lot of the tools you get with experience. If I were early in my career I'd be very hesitant relying on it as its a fragile ecosystem right now that might disappear, in the same way that you want to avoid tying your skills to a single companies product. In my workflow it slows me down because the answers I get are often average or wrong, it's never "I'd never thought of doing it that way!" levels of amazing.
Isn't this also something that happens in the rift war books by Raymond E. Feist?