I keep seeing this rhetoric, but every time I use a vpn for non piracy stuff I’m captcha’d to hell. Is my experience somehow different from most?

If the experience is everything is blocked or everything is captcha hell, the latter still sounds like an improvement. I personally have no need for a VPN so I don’t know what the internet is like with one, but it does sound like without one the internet is essentially blocked.

The more widely used a VPN the more aggresively it's captcha’d, use a paid less known VPN and the experience improves dramatically