HCaptcha is a popular alternative to Google's reCaptcha

So when do we NEED captchas? Is it truly just an anti spambot for site comments?

Browsing around with noscript, uBlock Origin, a VPN, and Waterfox means a I see way more of the internet's anti-bot stuff than before and in many, many cases, I get to sit and point out crosswalks and chimneys and fire hydrants because a webmaster apparently cannot do any request throttling from an IP address...Although I guess I need to partially correct myself since with a large enough botnet the IP address can change significantly in a quick manner.

In those cases I guess I downgrade this to a grumble about captchas being annoying, but overall, I continue wishing for a way to have the open web without a long term need for 'em.