Why Cloudflare's Free-Plan Cache Rules Don't Cache Your HTML (And the Page Rules Fix That Does)

A 90-minute debugging session, with curl outputs. We run a 6,800-page games portal behind Cloudflare on the Free plan. Last week's audit flagged that cf-cache-status was returning DYNAMIC for every HTML request, despite an origin Cache-Control: s-maxage=31536000. We spent 90 minutes building Cache R