Is DDos simply becoming a racketeering operation?
DDOS is becoming more and more commonplace. (DDOS to meetup.com? why?).
Basically, paying for protection from cloudflare or akamai is simply now part of the business.
Is this the future? Are there no technical solutions that will stop DDos? It's only going to get worse from here. There are technical solutions; you have even mentioned two of them. They're not easy to build, that's why the same thing provided commercially is expensive.