That’s the conventional interpretation, yes. Cloudflare does have a huge network and broad presence, but it doesn’t stop their proxy from slowing down communication to some degree.
There’s no real issue with turning on the orange cloud once Let’s Encrypt has issued a certificate, providing you disable their performance features and ok with the increased latency. As we said above it’s useful if you need to obscure your server IP or want to cache /uploads. It’s just not the magic bullet some purport it to be.