If you don’t want to go full Cloudflare you can mitigate DDOS using these kind of technique locally.

https://blog.nginx.org/blog/mitigating-ddos-attacks-with-nginx-and-nginx-plus

Cloudflare will be a lot more effective in case of attack. But I don’t think most people need more than a few mitigation rules. If DDOS really come, there are very few things you could do to mitigate anyway.

I think unlike Google, there are still many pure engineers that need to contribute to open source to be motivated and are still have some power.

I feel, but I am not sure, that for Google, thing have switched more and faster to the side of Big soulless corps.

Generally speaking my experience is that even in these big soulless corps there are positive and passionate people. But quite often they do not have enough decision power to have a positive impact.