My website was hit very hard by the December 2024 spam update (or was it not?)

I've been building a project that answers questions about Islam for almost a year now, and I'm constantly developing it to add things, remove things and optimize things - both content and HTML structure. My goal was to drive traffic mostly through Google Search, and it had been working as intended until December of last year. The fact that I'm always changing things made it very difficult for me to identify the source of the sudden drop in impressions on December 20 of last year after they were building up pretty nicely. It could be new content that I posted that might be considered incorrect according to some standards (going against the elit3s), or it could be the fact that I added simpleanalytics, or it could some changes I made to the hosting (moving behind Cloudflare - which I did reverse in the process of trying to figure out the problem), or it could be simply the algorithm update. Since the hit, I've been trying hard to keep everything in an optimal condition so that I'm not the problem, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if there's a better way to investigate this. Any expert opinions on how I could approach this problem or any obvious reasons that I might be not be aware of? Is there anything other than waiting for another update that might bring it back on Google? I did notice that Cloudflare for some reason doubled the average response time, but this has been since reversed.