Yes. From a technical standpoint, archive.is' stance is that it's actually important useful data that, more importantly, isn't a privacy violation. How much you agree with archive.is depends on a very technical understanding of the subject, or barring that, it depends on how much you buy Cloudflare's reasoning. Cloudflare's business would prefer you pay for Cloudflare (at large but specifically their anycast) instead of using an optimization available to you as a Internet business to route clients to a more optimal/closer server.
As far as the privacy implications, remember that the site you visit needs to know your IP address in order to respond to your request, so while there are some issues to be aware of, it's kind of hard to see it as a privacy violation and not Cloudflare trying to squash the little guy, imo.
The check archive.is uses to return garbage is specifically for cloudflare's IPs all other non-EDNS works fine. You can dig to there authoritative DNS server yourself to see.
There's an argument that CF benefits if that DNS extension is not in widespread usage. (Because CF sells a CDN but if sites can "just implement" that with DNS, then there's "nothing for them to sell".)
It leads to further centralization of the internet where a few have more data to make better decisions (and more money) and the smaller players are left out.
That's a fairly good argument IMO. Today's Cloudflare does not sell data. Tomorrow's, or our children's generation's, could.
As you say, this could become a monopoly and it's cool to see a popular website standing up for a future where littler guys can still make it. It's not clear to me that's the precise argument he's made so I'm just guessing.
When did HN get these new awesome nav buttons? Root, next, ... amazing!
