Are you using TOR or a VPN, spoofing your User-Agent to something uncommon, or doing something else that tries to add extra privacy?

That kind of user experience is one that I've seen a lot on HN, and every time, without fail, it's because they're doing something that makes them look like a bot, and then being all Surprised Pikachu when they get treated like a bot by websites.

I started having similar experiences when I switched to using Brave browser that blocks lots of tracking. Many websites that didn't show me those captchas and Cloudflare protection layers now have started to pop up on a regular basis.

I get this and I assume it's because I clear cookies pretty frequently. It used to be the case that that didn't matter, but nowadays everyone shields their websites using JS.

I use regular Edge with uBlock and get cloudflare crapchas all the time.

I've found Vivaldi to be a much better experience, chrome based, and supports ublock in all its glory

I tried it and didn't like it. Currently migrating to Firefox though, their vertical tab implementation is really decent.