then I tried signing-up to lemm.ee but was greeted with a couldflare of non ending page reload after solving captcha.
That particular instance was very recently the source of a lot of CSAM and spam, so that'd be why. A lot of instances recently upped their security to combat that.
There's nothing forcing anyone to use those services, but the reality is that instances that aren't quick to respond to those kinds of incidents will get defederated.
Cloudflare is a lazy but very effective and economical solution to this. The alternative is staff to monitor everything that goes through 24/7 which for most instances isn't easy or possible. Many can barely afford the infrastructure costs.
The fact that very big instances hold the majority of the communities and discussions on lemmy and the fediverse in general is concerning.
It's concerning regardless of the whole proxy banning debacle. A healthy fediverse is a well spread out fediverse.
But I doubt all instances will ever be that way. You don't need a lemmy.world account to use lemmy.world's communities, any instance would do.
My instance for example doesn't use Cloudflare or any CDN, although it is invite only because I really don't have time to deal with moderation. But I can access it over Tor if I want, and you can access it over Tor and browse it (read-only) just fine.
Reddit on the other hand wants to keep the data for themselves. Their VPN, Tor and proxy block isn't just for posting, it's for reading too and that is a much worse problem. They want to hoard the data so they can train their own Reddit AI on it. On lemmy you'll always have at least read access to the platform through Tor and VPNs through random instances.
At least on Lemmy, a fully featured Tor hidden service instance is entirely possible, if someone is willing to vet the account getting registered and potentially malicious uploads. And anyone can make it happen.