> I can see a future where I’m cut off from parts of the web because of captchas.
I’ve seen this in past and present. Google’s “click on all the bicycles” one is notoriously hard, and I’ve had situations where I just gave up after a few dozen screens.
Chinese captchas are the worst on this sense, but they’re unusual and clearly pick up details which are invisible to me. I’ve sometimes failed the same captcha a dozen times and then saw a Chinese person complete the next one successfully on a single attempt, on the same browser session. I don’t now if they measure mouse movement speed, precision, or what, but it’s clearly something that varies per person.
> Google’s “click on all the bicycles” one is notoriously hard
It is hard because you need to only find the bicycles people on average are finding.
Google captchas are hard because they're mostly based on heuristics other than your actual accuracy to the stated challenge. If they can't track who you are based on previous history, it doesn't matter how good you answer, you will fail at least the first few challenges until you get to the version with the squares that take a few seconds to appear. This last step is essentially "proof of work", in that they're still convinced you're a bot, but since they still can't completely block your access to the content, they resign themselves to wasting your time.
It doesn’t help that they think mopeds and scooters are bicycles
This is probably caused by Google aggregating the answers from people with different languages, as the automatic translations of the one-word prompts are often ambiguous or wrong.
In some languages, the prompt for your example is the equivalent of the English word "bike".
> I just gave up after a few dozen screens.
A few dozen?? You have much more patience than me. If I don't pass the captcha first time, I just give up and move on. Life is too short for that nonsense.