There are diminishing returns once a CAPTCHA gets past a certain point. Bad actors can (and do) just humans to fill out captchas all day. We get some spam submissions on our sites that I'm 99.9% certain are people in developing countries copy/pasting spam templates and filling out captchas by hand.

What happens is the captcha is farmed out to live operators who solve it.

I disagree. Adding Google's captcha is a 15 minute exercise. If i remember correctly, you copy/paste a snippet then add a callback in your own code. Whereas rolling your own captcha implementation would take much longer and be worse.

And it is this very convenience that has countless sites using it. As I said, there are other systems which are just as easy to implement as Google's and which are not overkill and also more privacy friendly (Google's CAPTCHA is known to fingerprint the user using heuristics like mouse movements, screen resolution, etc).

> there are other systems

Like what?

There are many easy to use libraries specific to different languages(like https://www.phpcaptcha.org/ for php) and frameworks. These are not as secure as recaptcha, but in most cases does the trick. There are also services similar to recaptcha like solve media and hcaptcha. I believe hcaptcha is a drop-in replacement(https://hcaptcha.com/docs).

Which Captcha systems would you recommend?

On that note, has anyone tried hCaptcha? I am considering using it on a project

I work on hCaptcha, let me know if you have any questions.

> trying to create a psyop[0], or disinformation campaign, or even a sockpuppet army

That's not a viable reason. Anyone doing so is going to have a budget and human reCAPTCHA solving is less than $0.01 per CAPTCHA. It costs very little for mass account creation, reCAPTCHA or not.