You people are nerds.

I am planning on making a home file server to save my many portable document formats on a place other than my dinky lil laptop. I have been seeing stuff about reverse proxies and the like, so I can send my friends the files if need be and all of them just say to use cloudflare but I vaguely remember people being mad at them a while ago. You people seem like the sort who hold grudges in tech. Are there any meaningful alternatives to them also why were people mad at them?