Comment by aeonfox

> start generating profit, and then you can start optimizing your costs

Good thing they jumped on that as soon as they were profitable instead of burning cash. Oh wait...

I think a distinction to draw here is that Cloudflare had relatively large capital raises and were almost immediately profitable¹. They had the luxury of throwing away money. Judicious optimisation makes sense for scrappy start-ups, especially when trivial optimisations like these could easily be farmed off to an agent.

¹ https://timeline.www.cloudflare.com/