Yeah, captchas have gotten worse recently. I had one asking me to choose “the largest animal” and it had an example picture of what was meant to be a lion. There was a rhino in one of the other pics.
It wanted me to click on lions, but then gave me something larger than a lion.
There were a few around that same timer period. IIRC, that’s also about when the whole /r/jailbait controversy happened, and the site suddenly had a really bad reputation among non-users. Like before it had been seen as a weird site, but then it was suddenly seen as outright predatory. Users suddenly didn’t want to associate with the site. Then the t_d stuff happened, which just compounded the issue of users not wanting to associate with the site due to the bad reputation.