It does make you think about such a high level on anonymity on part of Chipmixer yet they decided to use Cloudflare. Why would they do that if they were serious about anonymity?
If Chipmixer was run by an individual then he might not have covered all possible areas of anonymity even if he tried. Apart from the PayPal issue there were other clues that he left behind that got him caught which shows he probably did not have a team with him. Using Cloudflare had advantages but not for any anonymity based website.
It was inevitable at some stage money would be laundered through Chipmixer as they will be through virtually all mixers therefore the service is too risky to operate. The accusations made by the FBI are serious and after he is eventually arrested he will probably serve a very long sentence as the law enforcement agencies would want to make an example of him.
Not a good idea to go through Cloudflare, which decrypt and cache the whole traffic, if we want to really improve our privacy..
I'm neither in favor of Cloudflare, but I'm not quite sure what's the problem if you're behind Tor-- besides of course the fact that it's a pain in the ass to complete the captcha (if any). I'm not an expert on this field, but isn't there a problem with DDoS-ing non-protected websites? I remember ChipMixer getting down for maintenance quite frequently in the past.
I think the problem is that everything you see they can also see. Basically, Cloudflare knows every step of your mixing process, and we all know that Cloudflare is a single email from handling all the data to a 3 letters agency (as we learned through ChipMixer, evidenced by the DoJ paper - P.S I'm just explaining what I read, don't sue me Mr DoJ, tyvm)