How a Bot: To Bot, or Not to Bot

I've been noticing something weird when pulling up Permies.com on my Android devices. When first logging in, or pulling up a tab that hasn't been used in a while, I briefly see a 'captcha' thing asking to check off a box to show you are human. In a split second, this is cleared out and I'm let into the site.

I've heard Paul frequently mentioning how it seems that large corporate entities that don't like what gets done at Permies have been messing things up with bot attacks in recent years. As I've been investing a great deal of my own time adding content to the site and endeavoring to build a mutual aid network here, I'm interested in long term prospects of keeping things groovy under the hood. Using bots pretending to be human to protect it from attacking bots pretending to be human seems like it might present a larger problem down the line.

I'm guessing if there were anything 'crowd sourceable' besides straight donations that could help the situation it would be presented in the periodical emails. But, just thought I'd check to see if there was anything that could be clarified or offered in a discussion here...

My tablet browser has the option to do captcha for me now.  It got turned on automatically.  Apparently the computer is better at providing I am a real human than I am.  

On most captcha, it flashes onnscreen, then sends me into the site.

Perhaps I should mention that I am using a Firefox variant browser with LineageOS on my phone. And that the concern is browsers can easily defeat basic 'humanity checks'.

I know one specific problem mentioned was bot accounts on YouTube being used to defeat the (un)popularity algo and tank some of the videos?

But I think some of the need for site upgrades here was due to aggressive bot activity? Or has it just been to cope with increasing traffic? I'd be curious to know how estimates of real vs. bot traffic to this site are derived...