Not necessarily. It could be one for loop running on tens of thousands of compromised IoT devices, with the only thing distributed being the command that starts the loops.

Right. So why does the fact that they targeted 34,500 ports show it was a well-engineered attack? By itself it's just evidence that they know how to iterate over ports. Coupled with the data size (7.3Tbps) we know they had an enormous botnet. None of this points to a well-engineered attack, it just means that lousy IoT has made botnets incredibly cheap.

A well-engineered attack would not draw headlines for its scale because it would take down its target without breaking any records.

Clownflare is more incentivized to make it look like they are the only ones who can defend against such an attack so they could gather more users for backdooring the majority of internet traffic. I wonder if it would be possible to create a peer-to-peer and decentralized DDoS mitigation service for anyone. All you gotta do is donate some of your bandwidth

I’m confused what this would accomplish? Do GRE tunnels drop UDP packets or something?

Your first line is wrong.

While it may not impact your site, it does impact your hosting provider. As their costs go up, your costs go up. Anything on the Internet at this point needs DDoS / scraping protection. If may not drop your service, but your ISP or upstreams may blackhole your route.

The "old web" (current web) was largely based on an open exchange of information.

The "new web", post AI bot scraping, is taking its place. Websites are getting paywalls. Advertising revenue is plummeting. Hosting providers are getting decimated by the massive shift in bandwidth demand and impact to systems scraped by the bots.

Fwiw, i have a site with nearly zero content or users; randomly it got ddos'd one day, and never happened again. I think the reasons for a ddos can be wide ranging, from just testing, to nation state, to someone is unhappy with your font choice

An 11 year old with a discord account and a stolen credit card can now rent massive capabilities that can take (smaller, limited peered) entire countries offline for brief periods these days.