It may not be buster causing that. I see that sometimes on a VPN, but also when not on a VPN but using Firefox with ghostery/ublock origin, etc.

It may not, but Ive seen the same. Only with Buster. And only since recently.

It may help if you go to the extension's settings and enable user input simulation and install the client app.

Though Google may block your access to the audio challenge regardless of the browser or extensions you use, see more details here: https://github.com/w3c/apa/issues/25

I also get this sometimes, not even using buster. Once I was not able to access package tracking information, because Google blocked me completely via recaptcha from that.

I actually do a lot of automated queries from my computer.

I like to scrape and save content that may disappear. Just recently one psychology website I liked years ago where I put a lot of effort to comment on, silently deleted all 60k user comments, including 100s I wrote, and started putting old articles behind a paywall. My activity is perfectly legal, as I'm doing all this for my own personal use.

Thankfully I have all the content locally in the database.

Does it mean I should be prevented from accessing third party services that use recaptcha?