when you have a certain world vue your frame of reference is this one. And you will prefer to hide reality for a very long time before admitting you made a poor decision. Worse admitting your point of view is not moral, or problematic.

All of this to say, people will not make a direct correlation between facts and their acts. They will find another plausible (for them) explanation.

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.