I disagree. Bots have always been an issue, but now every form of CAPTCHA that can be solved by a human can also be solved by a multi-modal language model. Bots are slowly taking over in forums where they previously would have been immediately spotted and banned.

If the only argument you can make every time someone proposes an onerous, privacy-destroying solution to this problem is deny the problem exists, you're going to lose.

GP is correct, we need an alternative we can point to.