I'm not sure I agree that it is "a bad thing". The current internet culture seems quite happy to slap captchas all over the place. When they first rolled out,

I'm not sure I agree that it is "a bad thing". The current internet culture seems quite happy to slap captchas all over the place. When they first rolled out, captchas were predominantly a barrier for "write access" (e.g. make an account, complete a sale, write a comment). But companies like Cloudflare have been putting captchas everywhere for mere read access. Because Captchas are designed to be easy for ("normal") people but hard for machines, they often disallow disabled users. I'm a ("mostly normal") 35 year old, but I _really_ struggle with captchas. I despise when Cloudflare tosses a captcha challenge before loading a page, as I'll need to spend 3-5 minutes of effort to figure out which tiny pictures have a stoplight, motorcycle, or crosswalk. Will someone come up with a less restrictive anti-bot solution? I hope so. But even if not, I'm not sure it matters. According to comments in this thread (and elsewhere on the internet about the HBO Max captcha), many of these captchas are _already_ terrible at excluding robots. We're using captchas to exclude low-sophistication robots and disabled users. Seems wrong.