They can still use them if they meet certain criteria, and show that they 'need' them. The overuse probably comes from the incentive - Google is incentivized to encourage the use of captcha because it is curating a data collection for ai training. I imagine some of the 'gaslighting' that people experience is when they are given images that don't yet have a confidence rating high enough. I wonder if answering incorrectly often enough would result in being asked fewer questions?