Yep. You'd be surprised how stupid some bots are.

(And while I don't have hard data on this, I suspect that bot authors that don't know how to properly set up rate-limits and don't know how to set up captcha solving service bypass, so captchas are especially effective against them)

You can easily get an API key from 2Captcha, AntiCap, CapSolver, etc. - it costs basically nothing and it works.