Free egress is not free serving. R2 still bills every read, S3 does not bill origin transfer to CloudFront, and the variable that decides both bills is cache hit ratio. An evenhanded comparison of Cloudflare R2 vs Amazon S3 for media offloading, with the four levers that move the number and a decision procedure you can run against your own traffic.
A limit_req block that parses cleanly can still be doing absolutely nothing, or throttling every visitor behind one CDN edge. This guide covers Nginx rate limiting and bot mitigation as they actually behave in production: getting the key right behind a proxy, what burst and nodelay do to your traffic shape, sizing zones correctly, rolling out in dry run mode, and layering bot handling from robots.txt through user agent maps to firewall escalation.
You got PageSpeed Insights to 98 and six weeks later Search Console still says the same URLs are failing. The score and the assessment measure different things, and Lighthouse cannot measure INP at all. Here is how to fix Core Web Vitals on WordPress in the order that actually moves the report.
Put a CDN in front of a dynamic site carelessly and it will cache one user's personalised page and serve it to everyone — invisibly, because your logged-in browser looks fine. Here is how to classify routes, set cache headers that hold, and run the two curl commands that catch the leak.