Sure, the visible symptom of the issue is cloudflare blocking the image proxy, probably with good reason, since the explanation is absurd (except for the deanonymization part, which is just schizophrenically paranoid; no one cares enough about who's looking at some random image to waste their time setting that up), but the unnecessary and nonconsensual meddling with the urls is the root cause.
We're talking Lemmy here. As great as federation is, small self hosted instance servers will always provide less performance and get overloaded faster than whatever CDN the site the user is linking to is using, so that argument is evidently fallacious.
(Plus, the option to host the image on the instance server has always been there: just download the fucking image from wherever you found it and upload it to the fucking instance. If anything, what this does is take away that choice from the user, leaving us with the “choice” to upload the image... or have it silently uploaded for us anyway.)
Let's be serious, the only reasonable motive behind this (especially when you take into account the devs' notorious ideology) is to be able to better control what the users post.
The deanonymization bit falls by its own weight, since, sure, the original hoster can't see who's loading the image (not that they ever cared to to start with), but now the instance admins (and / or the devs) can. Nothing is ever anonymous in the cloud, for fucks sake. Again, this is just taking away the choice of who to trust, and making lemmy look like the most untrustworthy option in the process.
The most important part, though, is that by highjacking the image hosting without the user's knowledge (and against the user's will, since, again, we could always choose to host the image on the instance, and this applies specifically to the case where the user did not intend to host it here), the instance (and / or the devs) gets control over what image gets actually served.
Enshittification happens. Every single image in the cloud will, sooner or later, be replaced with an ad. That's as certain as the third law of thermodynamics. When you link to a cloud hosted image, you're (mis)placing your trust on the hoster to keep serving that version of the image for the foreseeable future. Maybe I trust the lemmy instance more than the original site, in which case I'll upload the image. Maybe I trust the site more, in which case I'll link it. Maybe I trust neither, and I'll self-host the image, and link it (which is almost certainly the best option for people posting images of themselves, as is the main intended case for lemmynsfw).
But those two later options are now gone. Stolen from us, the users. And, obviously, I (and hopefully most other users) no longer trust the instance, or lemmy. Now the instance (and / or the devs) always has the option to change the image, instead of only when we misplaced our trust on them.
Plus, as the current kerfuffle so evidently shows, it adds a completely unnecessary extra point of failure.
The images would work perfectly if they weren't being shoveled through a hostile proxy no one asked for which is being blocked by cloudflare, probably with good reason.
The lemmynsfw admins could trivially solve the issue for newly linked images by disabling this stupid malicious option (already uploaded ones would probably require fixing the mangled urls at the database level, which is the least that they deserve for having enabled it in the first place), but they're not, they're trying to get cloudflare to fix it, a well known sisyphean task, i.e., an evident waste of everyone's time.
But they're not, so they clearly want to keep the proxy, the very root of the problem.
The whole thing is therefore not only malicious, but profoundly stupid, and depressing.
Just like good old reddit. 🤢