As a Tor user, there was a time when Cloudflare's captchas reduced drastically. And as long as you're using the Tor Browser, there's a great chance that you'll rarely see Cloudflare's captchas.
Cloudflare still has a long way to go in terms of being nice to humans.
For a short while, it was significantly better. It probably lasted for 3-5 weeks, and then things fairly quickly progressed back to their usual, namely being captcha hell.
(Request first page, do captcha, click on next link, do another captcha, go back to first page, do captcha... wash rinse repeat.)
Edit: Also the event you described happened much earlier than when the drop of Cloudflare captchas happened, which was around if I remember correctly when Google announced "invisible captchas".
Well, it's not.
> The problem is that Cloudflare blocks Tor, not Tor Browser: not every Tor user uses Tor Browser.
Except the advice is, even when it does block Tor Browser, as they say it doesnt, the answer is to use Caching services.
The problem here is, it's now taboo to call these issues out. My posts' scores are -3, -1, and 1... I highlight this because it hid my main post. And alas, "-1" is used to silence legit grievances.
Well then they did a favor to you and you should thank them, if you're using Tor without the Tor Browser chances are big that you're screwed by your fingerprint and lack of first party isolation and stream isolation, see the 2nd last paragraph here for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14583699
Because of that, I primarily run those transits, and I tend to get captcha hell still. I'd be willing to debug on my end.
Which Tor Browser version do you have?