Just because mixedCase does not find captcha pictures to be depressing does not necessarily mean that mixedCase has problems with emotional intelligence. I have no major issues with emotional intelligence as far as I can tell and I also do not find captcha pictures to be depressing. Maybe I would if I looked at them for hours for some reason, but I do not, and certainly the idea of them being "unbearably" depressing strikes me as quite extreme. I understand the author's points about the lack of people, the strange angles and so on and I am sure that if for some reason I had to live in a strangely-angled reality full of roads and gray buildings and devoid of people, that I would find it unpleasant. But I do not have to live in such a reality - I barely even glance at any given captcha, then I click some parts of it and move on.
The way that the author describes the captcha images reminds me of the idea of "liminal space" - a concept that relates to a certain kind of eerie sensation but is perhaps most familiar to people in the form of art that seeks to evoke this sensation and makes normally familiar things like shopping malls and schools instead look eerie. Often simply photographing such places without any people in the pictures does the trick. I do see the eerieness in the captcha pictures but again, for it to really affect me I would have to focus on them for much longer than I actually do. The author, for whatever reason, has become particularly interested in captcha images, but until I read this article at least, I was not.