When you say paid Netlify is as fast as Cloudflare do you mean the Pro plan or the Enterprise plan? AFAIK the enterprise plans run on a different network, with more distributed servers, although I could be wrong.
It seems at least part of the noticed difference in speed has to do with my region, as pagespeed insights gives me sub-second FCP and LCP on my Netlify website [0], which feels a bit better than what I get at home (with 500mbps fiber). It's possible my ISP is at fault, but I'm not sure how I could diagnose this much better.
