That's a pretty dismissive attitude. We recently added reCAPTCHA to our sign up flow at Codecademy and it helped combat spam a lot. The site was harder to manage and moderate before we took that little step.
Assuming all websites using reCAPTCHA are not worth using seems ridiculous to me.
This is like the places that make me store my backpack behind the counter while I'm shopping. Yes, I totally get that it's one way to combat theft, but it's also treating me like I might steal something. From a UX perspective, it's hostile. I'm having to do work to solve a problem that I've never been the cause of. So if I have a choice, I don't visit those establishments a second time. They have chosen to put those extra roadblocks in place, and I've chosen to go somewhere where I don't feel like I'm getting punished for someone else's crime. Seems like a win/win to me.
To suggest it's a "dismissive attitude" to not want to be hassled due to some other bad actor implies looking at it from the business perspective, and not necessarily from the perspective of the effect it has on users.
I understand your point, but do you have a better suggestion to solve the spam problem? It's a really hard problem, and CAPTCHAs do a reasonable job of solving it at low cost to the end user.
Note that certain adware/spyware domains, like google-analytics( look at the tags <maybe-spy> and <maybe-ads> ), are commented out, so edit the file as per your needs.
Google's re-capthas are coming from google.com, to block them add:
127.0.0.1 google.com
127.0.0.1 www.google.com
This may be a tough choice to make, depending on how integrated has Google become with your life ( note how I phrased this relationship ).
Assuming all websites using reCAPTCHA are not worth using seems ridiculous to me.