The site is using Cloudflare for DDoS protection, and unfortunately Cloudflare is probably the most effective tool for this. It also looks like it might be archive.org in the screenshot, and they’ve been dealing with a lot of DDoS attacks lately.

I don’t think Google advertises “we force you to scan a QR code” as a feature of reCAPTCHA either, so it feels a little weird to me to blame the site for using a DDoS protection tool that in turn uses reCAPTCHA for human verification when Google randomly decides to add a new stupid challenge type.