It says in the docs:

"## Accessibility

For users with accessibility needs who cannot use hand gestures to complete the challenge, reCAPTCHA continues to provide visual and audio challenges, and develop more accessible and secure alternatives."

So it seems you can just do a different task if you don’t want to do the hand thing anyway.

Edit: obligatory F google still of course.

The article title is clickbaity. It doesn’t ‘get rid of’ the start menu and explorer. It just makes the processes completely hang so you can’t open any applications, can’t open the menu and can’t open task manager to see wtf is going on. You also can’t access the shutdown function so you have to manually power off.

This happened to me as I was setting up a Windows 11 / Linux dual boot system yesterday, and the Windows side was behaving as described in the article.

I gave up and just installed Linux alone in the end.