I wish I could be given the option to just pay instead of solving a captcha. At the end of the day that's what bots end up doing (pay a human to solve the captcha for them), so why not just cut out the middleman, and let me pay the website.

Payment forms need captchas too, otherwise they'll get millions of transactions from card testers making the costs unsustainable.

Cryptocurrencies would be a good solve for this. Specifically, a layer 2 network on top of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin's lightning network or payment channels on Ethereum, both of which allow for subcent transactions with subcent fees.

There are obviously UX challenges to making it easy to acquire the crypto, but I could imagine this starting as an optional alternative to captchas.

>which allow for subcent transactions with subcent fees.

Yea micropayments were Satoshi's vision. For example you could pay like 1/100 of a cent to unlock and bypass captcha puzzle.