In my experience, the limiting factor is speed. Tor is not exactly the fastest protocol in the world, and while streaming video over Tor has gotten better over time, it's still not what I'd call ideal. For regular browsing, the loss of speed is inconvenient enough to annoy the average user, myself included.
I've used tor-browser and Brave's tor mode quite a bit. I've not really had problems with speed nor playing 480p video (if sites default to higher res it's sometimes a problem).
Captchas on some sites, for sure, sometimes a different route will fix it. Usually mainstream sites either block tor or work properly.
Hope you like solving CAPCHAs, because you're going to be doing a lot of that. And you can forget about searching with Google. Also you'll learn to hate Cloudflare as they straight up block you from so many websites.
And don't even think about trying to sign up for some free service like an email account or game account. Your account will be flagged before you finish thinking up your username.
> Also you'll learn to hate Cloudflare as they straight up block you from so many websites.
Well, it's the websites using Cloudflare, not Cloudflare doing it for fun. You're better served hating other Tor users for ruining nice things for you.
But you're lucky if a service even allows Tor. I straight up block it for some of my applications since it's 99.99% abuse.
"Use tor for everything" is a bad answer, because the question specifically said "I'd really like to be able to access [...] everything else directly as usual"
"Use tor for everything" might be good life advice, but it's not a good answer for "how do I avoid using tor for everything" :P
In practice some sites drop Tor connections, and localisations come through wrong, but that doesn't seem to be why you said "no".