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Whilst I hate Captive Portals in most circumstances (most hotels I stay at have completely broken implementations) we find them to be extremely useful.

We run LAN gaming events and a Captive Portal helps us enforce our physical check in procedure. If someone has somehow bypassed checkin, they have no access to our network... puts a bit of a downer at a LAN event.

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You would think modern wi-fi standards would be able to support per-user username and passwords by now.

You can do 802.1x user/pass auth. In general though it's far more expensive to run and maintain because your access layer (APs, switches etc) now needs to be fully managed to support 802.1x. That, and a lot of OSs have janky support that doesn't follow the standard well.

How do you enforce the physical check with captive portal? Do you give everyone a shared password to go into the portal?

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