Terry

That's a huge chunk of the internet you're filtering there, including plenty of legitimate sites. Care to explain why you dislike Recaptcha in particular that much?

Let me be the Devil's advocate here.

You/we (as users) are being compensated by being permitted onto whatever service is being gatekept by Recaptcha. We profit further by having that service not be completely tainted by bots. Sure, recaptcha ain't even close to perfect and can be easily bypassed, but any barrier of entry is better than none at all.

Google profits by getting free training for their models.

And the service provider profits by saving on bandwidth, moderation etc., which in turn benefits the users too in the form of a less degraded service.

There are many things to dislike about Google and what they are doing to the web. Recaptcha should not even be in your top 100.

Depends on what mode you're playing.

Primarily, there's casual matchmaking, which actually is full of new players. Sadly, especially in off-hours, there's also a lot of bots hosted by some mentally unstable script kiddies (no joke, they buy in a bot hosting framework and just pop that on a VPS somewhere) dedicated to ruining the game for everyone with aimbots, mic and chat spam etc. They abuse the fact that Valve hasn't updated the anticheat in what feels like years. Regardless, there are still tons of healthy games to be found and bots usually are kicked within seconds.

Additionally, there are community servers which, depending on the actual community playing there, can have bonkers veterans or absolute noobs. These servers often are modded, too.