My main point is, you can be working with people that are pretty smart and well educated, with a pretty good baseline understanding of theory but that doesn't always mean they have the actual experience and/or thorough enough understanding of a given set of tooling and environment to implement correctly.

I say this as someone who is autodidactic (self-taught) with regards to software engineering. I never stop learning, reading, experimenting and just gaining as much understanding over everything I touch as I can. My mind doesn't always work like most people. And my statements are not meant to be insulting, just my point of view from the outside...

In that, I feel that a lot of FAANG (whatever the correct/current conflation is) tend to rely on a lot of focus that tends to favor those with a formal education, and those closer to that education (less experienced outside school). In practice, my experience is that this will lead to an excess in "Enterprise Pattern" usage as well as unnecessary complexity which leads to an increased risk of error.

> which means they will pay OP's issue attention which is what OP wants anyway as a resolution. Win/win.

Precisely this. It isn’t always about getting your whole day in court; sometimes it’s just about getting a human to intervene at all.

That said, arbitration would be just as acceptable as small claims court here. Either way, legal will see the petition and escalate internally. Arbitration costs a lot more than having someone open a support ticket, especially if your complaint says in plain language:

“This is solely to get a human to tech support my problem because I’m trapped in a phone tree loop that won’t let me file a support ticket. I plan to withdraw my complaint as soon as a human being engages with the technical issue preventing me from contacting support, so I can resume spending my money on Cloudflare.”

(Notice that this is careful not to demand a resolution to the issue. That’s really important.)