That's about it. Horrible user experience - oh you're about to pay us, just click a few sidewalks first - and condescension of asking people to do a menial task that improves their ML models. But forcing you to use one of their sanctioned browsers and let the record what they want to is where the real hostility comes in. Its exercising monopoly power to squeeze more out of people and repress competition, I'd call that hostile.
Do you block Google trackers aggressively? reCAPTCHA uses that very heavily: if you allow all of their stuff and they track you across the web, you'll have to basically never do more than click the button. On the other hand, if you take your privacy seriously and are aggressive about tracker blocking, you'll have a pretty awful time.
I imagine hCaptcha doesn't have enough trackers sprinkled around the web to use those as signals for this.
I do block Google trackers, and have network state partitioning enabled, however the reCAPTCHA tests are usually bearable. (often a checkbox, sometimes a page) It seem like I get at least 2 pages of tests for hCaptcha every time.