I think when people are complaining about Captcha they're complaining about yet another "pick 6-20 pictures of traffic lights/school busses/stairs/stop signs/bicycles."

Not in this case. I wish I could find the actual post, but I recall reading a post on HN recently where a majority of the commenters were claiming that when they even see a Cloudflare verification checkbox that they leave the website.

This makes no sense to me as in my experience, you click the checkbox and then it verifies you without extra steps.

Usually but not always. The challenge is after clicking the checkbox, if it can't manage to verify automatically. So those users have learned not to bother.

If they want to train an AI they should pay for it like everyone else. Modern bots have zero problems solving these, it's just free training for them.

> If they want to train an AI they should pay for it like everyone else.

They're paying for electricity and taking data without paying for it. It seems to me that they're paying for it exactly the same way everyone else in AI did.