Most of the time they already know whether you’re human or robot from your user agent string and the speed of your request. I encountered multiple layer of Captchas if I turned in my VPN and blocked all trackers.
I’ve found that using a VPN tends to get e caught in more Captcha loops than not. I think google, etc. has gotten better at knowing which swathes of IP addresses belong to VPNs. I thought that maybe it was specifically an issue with NordVPN because it had gotten so popular, so I switched to Mullvad and nope. Still get way more captchas. Still keep it on.