captchas are fine. recaptcha is not.

between 2015 and ~2020, my home ISP was blessed with every recaptcha being 3 rounds of slow fade-in bullshit. I have also seen infuriating gaslighting of "please try again" after certainly correct solutions, as well as 5+ rounds followed by a notification that my network is entirely blocked.

I've developed a reflex to Ctrl+W upon seeing it, unless that is absolutely vital for me to get past it - which is exceedingly rare.

if I had a genie lamp, I'd waste one of my 3 wishes to do terrible things to the people responsible for that shit.

Most captcha services are just used to force users identified as having few other options into giving free tagging labour.