I think the weakness in your assumption is that CAPTCHAs exist solely to solve retail scalping by bots. It serves a much larger purpose - mitigating bot load i

I think the weakness in your assumption is that CAPTCHAs exist solely to solve retail scalping by bots. It serves a much larger purpose - mitigating bot load in aggregate across an entire domain or network. Maybe you’re assuming that DDOS/bot attacks are rare? Because they’re not (1). If you let all of them continue willy-nilly, obviously it’ll get overwhelmed at some point? Plus, why waste so much server energy/time serving malicious load… (1) https://blog.cloudflare.com/network-layer-ddos-attack-trends-for-q4-2020/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/network-layer-ddos-attack-trends...