I am perfectly fine with rendering CAPTCHAs absolutely useless for bot prevention if it expedites websites finally getting rid of the absolute pox that is reCAPTCHA.

Yeah. Text captcha/Recaptcha can be solved by spammers. The more advanced the more cpu time it burns up but it still does little to stop them. It just makes it super inconvenient for me to solve. Sometimes they aren't even human readable.

In the worst case, there are people in poor countries solving those chaptas for relatively little money. Probably not worth for everyone, but when operating a botnet on a large scale, thats probably a pretty attractive option as well.

  >we should go to every e-commerce site that employs them, with full crap-blocking privacy mode on, load up on products/services, and then abandon our carts at the captcha.

I've been doing that for years [well, not the shopping trolley bit] on websites which throw fullscreen modal announcements in my face. The second it happens, I click off that website. I dream that the webmasters in question will have some advanced stats setup that tells them that, as soon as they digitally shat in my face I abandoned their sites. But, unfortunately I know it's an empty gesture.

https://stiobhart.net/2015-05-04-overlays-new-popups/

>abandon our carts at the captcha.

I thought the credit card number was the answer to the captcha on an e-commerce site.

On some yes, but many offer other payment methods.