Every then and now I need to use Google because of its better local results (so I also disable VPN) and I always fell into captcha hell (no acc, no cookies…), but it has been some time already Google don’t bother me with captchas… have I been successfully fingerprinted or something?
Or perhaps my ISP’s range of dynamic IPs improved its reputation recently?
I think this is likely the reason. maybe someone abused your ip or ip range in the past that caused it and that abuse fell off whatever range they use for deciding it. I’ve never gotten a captcha on google search when I’ve used it unless I had a VPN up.