[theamk]

Yep. You'd be surprised how stupid some bots are.

(And while I don't have hard data on this, I suspect that bot authors that don't know how to properly set up rate-limits and don't know how to set up captcha solving service bypass, so captchas are especially effective against them)

[lavezzi]

You can easily get an API key from 2Captcha, AntiCap, CapSolver, etc. - it costs basically nothing and it works.