Most of the time, the new CAPTCHAs do that and then never show an actual interactive element. The interactive gimmicks are a fallback in cases of high uncertainty.

The webmaster doesn’t need to worry about it, the anti-bot services handle who gets what difficulty of challenge. But the webmaster can specify whether they’d like to be more or less strict/difficult than usual.

Yeah, "recaptcha" in this case is shorthand for a lot of stuff we did to harden the endpoint that ultimately represents a minor shift in balance from no friction to some friction for otherwise legitimate users, but a pretty significant drop in illegitimate traffic.

The main idea here is that at some point just leaving the scrape running in a way that didn't overwhelm my backend would have resulted in me not caring enough to do that. But now they get nothing. Even if you're borrowing bandwidth and not paying, you should be a good neighbor is all.