Cangelosi forced this question. Here is what I verified, what it would actually cost to leave, and the one change I think we should make.
Your premise is half right. Cloudflare genuinely cannot serve a client apex when the client keeps their own DNS. That is a hard wall at our price point, not a misconfiguration, and no amount of fiddling fixes it.
But moving hosting is aimed at the wrong target. Only the apex redirect is broken. Every www site works on Cloudflare with one CNAME from the client. And of all our live client domains, Cangelosi is the only one where the client keeps their DNS. The rest of our apexes already work because those zones sit in our account.
A CNAME is illegal at a zone apex. Cloudflare proves apex ownership only by CNAME, or by Apex Proxying, which is Enterprise with allocated static IPs and account team pricing.
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