Just making a file valid HTML doesn't make it "web content". This file is being fetched by an application, not being viewed by a user.
I'm not sure this is the most reasonable rule but there are definitely some benificial aspects to it. For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.
> Just making a file valid HTML doesn't make it "web content".
By Cloudflare's rationale it does.
> For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.
Bandwidth is bandwidth. If 100,000,000 humans want to download a 10KB text/html page v. 100,000,000 programs wanting to download a 10KB text/plain file, both within the same time period, then that's going to be the same degree of load on Cloudflare's end.
I'm not sure this is the most reasonable rule but there are definitely some benificial aspects to it. For example the load on human-viewed content is limited by how often people want to view it. Not how often their browser wants to redownload it.