Can someone explain to me why CAPTCHAs are used all over the place for sites that don't have user interactions? I understand it for account creation. I underst

Can someone explain to me why CAPTCHAs are used all over the place for sites that don't have user interactions? I understand it for account creation. I understand it a bit less for login (seems like a lazy way of preventing automated attempts). But for simply accessing a site? What gives? I'm increasingly starting to find that only tech blogs, the odd big site I'm logged in on like Amazon, and sites like HN are usable lately, because anything else seems to require a 1 minute + gateway of CAPTCHA + GDPR + whatever else before I can actually get to the site. Is it some way of filtering out users the sites don't want without expressly having a "403 Forbidden" or whatever?