Though if you aren't considered suspicious, image captchas are way less ridiculous, too. The scoring system goes all the way from .1 to .9, but usually you're either in one or the other category based on who knows what (probably mostly ip addresses, but Google doesn't tell us so who knows?).
So in the end the service is mostly just something that arbitrarily classifies users as one or the other, bots can absolutely solve them when classified as "probably human" and they're impossible for humans when classified as "probably bot".
If you want to actually present users a challenge to verify they're human, you're even better off giving them something like captchouli[2], or just a good old scrambled letters on a picture thing (which is what Google uses for their login as well, BTW). hCaptcha is also a great alternative (anything is, really) since it's still mostly about classifying users by making suspicious ones solve challenges. reCAPTCHA is absolutely not, it judges you before the challenge.
And that's fine, some websites want that. It's their choice, I'm not mad if they ban me for not wanting to be tracked, it's probably for the better. What does make me angry is that reCAPTCHA is advertised falsely, that the challenge is a joke and a crime against humanity at once, and that despite that, people seem to believe that it's the challenge that is magically blocking the bots without realizing they're also blocking legitimate users.