Hi baek_p,
Thanks for your reply. Long story short, sort of! After some further fiddling I had also guessed out that the error was due to Ezoic. So I then set out to unravel my ezoic Cloudflare integration to find a root cause and blew up my website in the process, getting ‘variant also negotiates’ messages! I ended up removing my site from Cloudflare (as ezoic still had DNS records on my Cloudflare settings) and then re-added it. No more 403 errors, however I’m yet to reconnect to Ezoic. My next step after Ezoic reintegration was going to be to whitelist ezoic IPs in wordfence, which is further advice that I had read.
I’ll certainly check out your fix as well, thanks again!