You've misunderstood the issues completely. They had no issue with paying more. The issue is with the extortion of demanding they pay for 12 months up front, the 40x increase (7 million visits a month is 3 visits per second on average; not huge - definitely doesn't cost $10k/month), the terrible communication, and the retaliatory shutdown of their account. If you can't see the issue with any of those I'm not sure what's wrong with you.

Consider how Cloudflare should have handled this:

1. Instead of connecting them to sales repeatedly, connect them to a technical team who could explain the actual issue.
2. Let them pay monthly (honestly based on the emails from them it sounds like there actually is a monthly option; they just were trying to strongarm them into paying for a year).
3. Have less insane pricing.
4. Give them proper warning before shutting their site down. Not "your site may be closed", but "we will close your site on XXX".

Cloudflare are the clear villains here, assuming none of this is an outright fabrication, which seems unlikely based on the similar experiences of other people. You desperately grasping at the fact that its a casino to swing the moral balance is hilarious. Why do you want to defend Cloudflare so much? Do you have shares in them or something? (Pretty sure I do.)