What does the tunnel bring except DoS protection and hiding your IP? And what is the security concern with divulging your IP? Say when I connect to a website, the website knows my IP and I don't consider this a security risk.
If I run vulnerable software, it will still be vulnerable through a Cloudflare tunnel, right?
Genuinely interested, I'm always scared to expose things to the internet :-).
If you are using Cloudflare's DNS they can hide your IP on the dns record but it would still have to be locked down but some folks find ways to tighten that up too.
If you're using a bare metal server it can be broken up.
It's fair that it's a 3rd party's castle. At the same time until you know how to run and secure a server, some services are not a bad idea.
Some people run pangolin or nginx proxy manager on a cheap vps if it suits their use case which will securely connect to the server.
We are lucky that many of these ideas have already been discovered and hardened by people before us.
Even when I had bare metal servers connected to the internet, I would put a firewall like pfsense or something in between.