It sounds like it does handle apex domains, but only if you're using Netlify DNS or a provider which supports CNAME flattening. Assuming the potential problems with not doing so are disclosed during setup (not sure if they were) that actually seems pretty reasonable to me.
I run the Netlify Support team, and this statement from @michaelmior is correct: apex domains are served using redundant, global CDN if you use Netlify's DNS hosting, or Flattened CNAMEs from Cloudflare.
