If bots that can break CAPTCHAs become widespread, the volume of spam, scams, and other junk traffic is going to cause problems for many people and small websites.
Increase the cost of having bots do it, while...
...also increasing the time wasted by humans. Time which is considered much more costly/valuable than whatever $ value spent on the bots.
So maybe the time has come to regard captcha's pointless, and just drop that nonsense.
Big Tech built their empires on scraping and stealing data (How do you think LinkedIn or Facebook got started?) But when we try to scrape them they throw a massive hissy fit, and so they put a lot of engineering into CAPTCHA systems to keep their data locked away. Eventually, the pinnacle of bots will be something that reads the framebuffer, and manipulates a mouse and keyboard to scrape websites.
This has got these companies freaked out, because all the founders know the dirty secret of their origin story, and that someone else can come along and do exactly the same thing to them.
Thus the XKCD CAPTCHA: https://xkcd.com/810/
We’ll have to change the game again now that bots can beat humans at it.
The main tenets of apps that are resilient to bot spam are 1) scalability, so that they can handle huge quantities of traffic and bot-generated content, and 2) the ability to differentiate high quality from low quality content (regardless of whether it was created by a human). Ironically, AI is probably the solution to the second problem.