I was surprised to see that it's actually blocked by Cloudflare
Could you please check your firewall or WAF to see if there are any rules blocking connections from my home network?
I think you got your answer already. We don't have any firewall that blocks specific countries on
our site. However, the site is proxied by Cloudflare, and Cloudflare itself has its own filters based on the frequency of
tentatives of attacks to the site and, since 99% of the (failed) threats are coming from China, Cloudflare blocks connections to many networks in China.
So yes, you must use a VPN, no other way around.