It's literally the translation of dirt or filth in German.

Meine Freundin ist weg und bräunt sich

Did you read the article or the TL:DR in the post body?

The paper, released in November 2023, notes that even back in 2016 researchers were able to defeat reCAPTCHA v2 image challenges 70 percent of the time. The reCAPTCHA v2 checkbox challenge is even more vulnerable – the researchers claim it can be defeated 100 percent of the time.

reCAPTCHA v3 has fared no better. In 2019, researchers devised a reinforcement learning attack that breaks reCAPTCHAv3's behavior-based challenges 97 percent of the time.

So yeah, while these are research numbers, it wouldn't be surprising if many larger bots have access to ways around that - especially since those numbers are from 2016 and 2019 respectively. Surely it is even easier nowadays.

Yeah, that's about the way I'd expect it to go.

"Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO2. In addition, Google has potentially profited $888 billion from cookies [created by reCAPTCHA sessions] and $8.75–32.3 billion per each sale of their total labeled data set."

There might be a tiny chance they're not interested in changing things.

Maybe a billion dollar company has the budget to come up with something?

Looking at the numbers in this post, reCAPTCHA exists to make Google money, not to keep bots out.

I’d rather have no reCAPTCHA than the current state.

Considering the article states that reCAPTCHA v2 and v3 can be broken/bypassed by bots 70-100% of the time, they are obviously not the solution.

I feel like you just want mass layoffs to happen. Of course it is not possible to guarantee any number of games wont flop. But the fact is that they budget in a way that allows them to occasionally flop completely without having to strip their teams bare.

Where most companies (especially publically traded) just dump their earnings into bonuses or mass hirings (in the case of sudden success) some companies budget responsibly in a way that allows them to continue to have success without having to go through hiring/layoff-cycles.

Larian Studios currently seems to be one of those as does Pocket Pair.

See, your examples are all publically traded companies that basically only serve as moneymaking schemes for shareholders. Larian is still privately owned and founder & owner Swen Wincke recently stated in an interview that they had enough cash reserves to handle at least 1 total flop without the need to mass layoff people.

I'm much more inclined to believe him with the track record of Larian Studios recently over your armchair analysis.

Not true. They could have a decently stable developer base. That is, they don't overhire and don't "need" to have layoffs as a result.