Very interesting. When I built my own API for v4v.app, because I was pulling in the images which I put on QR codes for Lightning invoices, decided to act as my own cache in front of Imagehoster and to take some of the load off you.
It might be that I should turn some of that off :-) as cloudflare is probably a better bet than my signle api server.
Yes, it's the kind of thing that's best tested to be sure, but probably cloudflare is better. If you have someone who can test for you that isn't in the same region as your cache node (or if you have remote access to such a computer), you can ask them to measure the time difference when you turn on/off your cache.
I did some tests using Proton VPN and I don't think there will be a case where my single Privex server is better than cloudflare! It was often quicker before though for the avatars.
I've turned off proxying the images now. Sometimes my back end downloads and caches them anyway when generating QR codes with images server side.
But the clients now pull them direct and its noticeably more performant especially on this demo page which loads avatars while you select an account. It's quite a good work out for the back end.
https://v4v.app/selectdemo