> Uhm no the whole point of captchas is that it requires (or used to anyway) humans to solve them, thus limiting the rate to human speeds.

The CAPTCHA challenge page itself has to be served to a client that has not yet given any evidence that it's not a bot. It's just as expensive to serve the challenge page as it is to serve a cookie-setting page. Bots can infinitely retrieve the challenge page (and can also infinitely try to retrieve the underlying "authenticated" page, forcing you to process redirects).

The only reason it looks better to you is that a third party is serving the CAPTCHA. You could also have a third party serve the cookie-setting page.