PAT: Eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards (2022)
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
Essentially Cloudflare is working with Apple (and probably Google and Microsoft soon) to ensure that not using an approved device to access the web will mean you get to see more and more CAPTCHAs.
If you don't use a grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex (including the SDK) big tech browser (blink|geeko<-google,webkit<-apple) you are denied most of the "web", even though a noscript/basic (x)html is beyond enough for many internet services, if not nearly all of them.
And asking nicely to "just work" with a noscript/basic (x)html browser usually does not work (I tried). For critical online services, you will probably need lawyers.
It seems those people has a lot of hate against standards, simple (implementation effort is reasonable for one average developer) but able to do good enough job, and stable in time. The _real_ web was built on that (the core of the web standard is noscript/basic (x)html), not the "big tech"_ web.
I would also say that JS is not the (only) problem making browsers complex and large. CSS is also extraordinarily complex, and together with everything going into the DOM makes for a large chunk of browser complexity. Of course, JS adds another layer on top, but it's not like a no-JS web browser that can still render any modern page without JS is a simple project.
The issue is the "scripted" and dynamic web: its complexity is grotesque and absurd not to mention their mandatory need of a nearly state of the art c++ compiler which makes things even worse. We all know they want that to exclude de-facto small real-life working alternatives (or they are brain-washed... often the case).
css is not really the issue, since it is mostly orthogonal to the html document. Some "styling" stuff has actually some semantic value and should have stayed in html or be given _simple_ attributes/values/etc (I am not talking about the insanity of the "semantic web" we had a decade ago). In the case of the html table, the rulers (aka "borders"), as they "organise" kind of semanticely a "2D document".
HTML table "layouts" are not harmful as it is perfectly fine to have "semantic 2D html documents" and they actually can do wonders. Navigation thru such documents is already ok, namely even screen readers can go thru. But, if a document is good enough in 1D, don't fancy 2D documents.
I insist on the fact that when I used "semantic web", it is not a reference to the brain damaged specs we had about this a decade ago.