Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's a pretty poor excuse. why is privacy only available by submitting to a poor experience? privacy should be default, not a punishment
You're looking at it purely from the user side. Look at it from the admin side. Tor is basically a massive open proxy, and by blocking it or throwing up human checks like captchas, you eliminate a significant source of spam and abuse. There's not much to be done about this otherwise - a Tor user is sharing a network with a significantly higher than usual amount of the bad elements of the internet.
Oh and don’t forget they’ll even put the captchas on subdomains, like img.domain.tld. Go visit stackoverflow via VPN/TOR and watch how the site has no styling/images even if you do their stupid captcha on stackoverflow.com. They’ll still serve you another one on static{1-50}.stackoverflow.com. Fun.