Cloudflare has no part in this beyond providing the technology. There are various alternative "security check" pages that are used by others; cloudflare's is the best of the bunch IMO, though still annoying.
This page isn't cloudflare's, cloudflare stopped using google's captcha some years ago. It says ray id at the bottom, idk what's up with that, but it's clearly different.
I got banned on cloudflare yesterday for refreshing the a page too many times during a failed "human check" and am still bitter about it. You are 100% correct though, this isn't cloudflare. I still stand by the point though. Having massive consolidation in the space is dangerous.
50,000 tokens later (amounting to $74 in actual inference costs after IPOs in '27) and we can finally open a webpage that looks like it was designed in the 90's and using SingleFile plugin weighs in at 410KB. Another successful day browsing the World Wide Web.
This page isn't cloudflare's, cloudflare stopped using google's captcha some years ago. It says ray id at the bottom, idk what's up with that, but it's clearly different.