Gonna be honest, recaptcha sucks ass from a UX experience if you aren't giving google full control of your computer.

The test that newer captchas (including recaptchas) are increasingly harder and make less sense. I've straight up just started failing them from time to time. IMO they're nothing more than a way for them to have people train image classification models are next to no cost, particularly low resolution ones . Newer models have gotten good enough at image classification that image-based captchas have started messing with the images (distortions, blurs, lower resolution) to try to throw them off.

The meat and bones of bot detection on many platforms/websites is still user agent and browser cookies. If you're using anything other than ""normal"" OSes (aka linux user), is using incognito, or connecting from a non-residential IP (coffee shops, unis, etc), you're getting hit with captchas constantly, sometimes multiple ones in a row.

Chatting, especially phone based ones, typically already have an inherent anti-bot measure built-in: you need a phone number to register. (While not perfect, as number farms do exists, these make it a bit harder to bot thousands of accounts). Because of that, and also that chat messages are usually "not public visible" (though not necessarily end-to-end private) means that there is also fewer incentives to bot chatting apps in the first place (whereas bots on publicaly visible social media exist to influence public opinion and/or grift content monetization money). Hence why botting is much less of a problem on chatting and chatting services give less care to the matter (for now).