Completely agree, captcha’s aren’t gonna make it impossible to make bots, but it makes it more complicated. It will force bad actors to invest more time in it. Wich will turn some part of them away.
On a positive note, I think the fact that we see so many bot signups shows lemmy (the fediverse in general) is growing and matters, otherwise people wouldn’t spend so much time and resources to make these bots. All big platforms have these kind of problems and need to learn how to deal with them.
I was only talking about captcha’s for account creation. To just log in they would indeed be to much of a hassle.