It sucks. But that's exactly the point. Using the internet is a mission critical thing for many people and for some that means using Tor Browser or similar to get around oppressive governments. This sounds like a really effective way to make sure the things you're doing are impacting your customers minimally. I bet you guys screamed loudly and were heard more clearly than a random customer trying to use Tor day-to-day.

The problem being solved was not "anonymous internet access gets abused a lot", it was "the mechanism we use to combat abuse is too aggressive for some segments of our users and thereby denying service to actual humans, and these challenges are invisibile to our engineers and employees because they don't browse on connections that trigger the system".

As the blog post shows (and this is backed up by my experience as a user of Tor) CloudFlare significantly improved its handling of this in response. So I would say this is a success. I am sure that pressure from employees, including support guys, caused this long-running issue to finally get the attention it deserved.