Why can't I use HN without Cloudflare?

I'm blocking a lot of different domains with a local VPN on my iPhone. Sometimes I can use HN, but right now, it's broken. I'm blocking Cloudflare, and HN wants to connect to:

news.ycombinator.com.cdn.cloudflare.net

This is quite honestly very annoying to me, and I'd like to know why I can't just use HN without third party resources.

Thanks!