They mimic the cloudflare captcha page but they're not hosted by cloudflare.

Never understand this anymore, it's genuinely one of the easiest services to pay to bypass automatically (literally 3-liner of JS), webmasters are becoming incompetent.

If you don't understand something, the first thing to do is try to understand it, before going to "the people who use this are incompetent".

In this case, the answer is right there in the question: You have to pay to bypass it.

Sometimes, people just do dumb choices, there is nothing to understand except plain lazyness, there is better captchas, free, non-invasive, more secure, GDPR compliant and so-on that are also not covered by captcha-solving providers, so what's the positive argument about reCaptcha?

I was involved in evaluating captcha solutions. The only recaptcha alternative that met the requirements that we were able to find has hcaptcha, but it wasn't any cheaper (for us), and would require going through the vendor approval process, whereas google was already an approved vendor. There wasn't really a compelling reason to switch.

Maybe there is a better option out there, but if so, it has the disadvantage of being hard to find.

A very strong brand?

You really think it's the reason? I've worked with many developers, and they use reCaptcha just because they are used to it and did it in the past, I doubt customers love the "reCaptcha branding", to the contrary, nicer captchas (or even invisible ones, even better) improve retention.

"Because I'm used to it" is what a strong brand is.

> or even invisible ones

reCaptcha is "invisible" by default. Although if you use a non-cheomium browser and/or block tracking, you are more likely to trigger a non-invisible prompt. Annoying as that is for people like me and maybe you, that isn't the experience most users have.