Personally I think CAPTCHAs are harmful. They defend the enshittification economy, preventing the development of tools that protect human users of the web right in a time when it is more practical than ever to develop those tools.
Even in 2009 I knew people who were using neural networks (in PHP no less!) to decode CAPTCHAs with superhuman peformance. I see the whole thing as performative as those things get in my way tens or hundreds of times a day when I browse the web as a human but in years of webcrawling they didn't give me any trouble until the last two weeks.