The community member is having trouble with the documentation for setting up a Cloudflare redirect from www to the root domain. They don't understand why the documentation doesn't mention the need to create a CNAME record for this redirection to work. Another community member responds that a CNAME is not necessary, but rather a dummy DNS record pointing to Cloudflare's reserved IP address should be used instead. The community members discuss the best configuration for this setup, and one of them updates the documentation to address this issue. The final recommendation is to add a www record pointing to the Cloudflare IP address, and ensure it is proxied through Cloudflare for the redirection rules to work properly.
You are somewhat correct. There needs to be a DNS record in order for Cloudflare to do anything with it. If you don't add www. then Cloudflare isn't actually seeing the request come through.
However, it does not need to be a CNAME. Actually it should be a dummy record... ie a record that points to cloudflare's reserved dummy ip just for this kind of stuff.
What's the best possible configuration? I'm not technical enough to understand all the details of this subtlety, I just want the redirection to be done properly and not be penalised.