TIL about DNS CNAME "flattening" which is a cloudflare feature that allows you to put a CNAME at the domain root: something that is actually not allowed by the DNS RFC spec.
Why does that matter? I was helping a nonprofit who is using a website hosting company, but the nonprofit has its own domain name. The hosting company tells them to "create a CNAME pointing at blahblah.somehosting.com" which works great, I created "www.example.com" as a CNAME pointing to the hosting address.
But what about the "naked" domain? i.e. if I type example.com like a normal person instead of www.example.com it doesn't resolve, and I don't have anywhere to point it. The cloudflare solution as above is to allow you to do something non-RFC compliant and also put a CNAME record at the root.
Google domains takes a different approach, to solve the problem you can create a subdomain forward for "@" and point it at your www.example.com target. With "forward path" enabled on the entry the URLs will also be preserved through the redirect.
Under the hood Google creates A records for the root domain, so a request for the root domain will resolve to a Google service that then resolves your www.example.com CNAME, establishes a HTTP session with the requester and issues the requesting browser a 301/302 redirect.
