That's about it. Horrible user experience - oh you're about to pay us, just click a few sidewalks first - and condescension of asking people to do a menial task that improves their ML models. But forcing you to use one of their sanctioned browsers and let the record what they want to is where the real hostility comes in. Its exercising monopoly power to squeeze more out of people and repress competition, I'd call that hostile.

Which is still miles less hostile than a website forcing you to prove you are not a bot, every single time, which was the point.

Do you block Google trackers aggressively? reCAPTCHA uses that very heavily: if you allow all of their stuff and they track you across the web, you'll have to basically never do more than click the button. On the other hand, if you take your privacy seriously and are aggressive about tracker blocking, you'll have a pretty awful time.

I imagine hCaptcha doesn't have enough trackers sprinkled around the web to use those as signals for this.

Same. I heavily block google scripts and hate reCAPTCHA with a passion, but hCaptcha really takes the cake for the most painful captcha experience.

This is under the control of the site with hCaptcha, so you'll tend to see more variety in difficulty levels depending on their settings.

There will always be some individual variance, but when we've tested this people always solve hCaptcha faster than reCAPTCHA on average.

(disclosure: work there)