I'm not sure if they're profitable or not, but what I know is that demand for faucets are definitely a lot lower now compared to before; but people definitely still use them.
Why would you spend time and effort and something like that to not make money.
Some people do it as a hobby. I did the same in the past.
Are any beginners using them and or has anyone just started one?
The beginners are the ones that are definitely using faucets. Most have no idea that they're really wasting their time solving captchas. There's so much ways on making money online(outside of crypto). I'd rather work at mcdonalds than clicking faucets all day.
Faucets were only viable back in the day because new people(like me in 2016) used funds collected from faucets to play with bitcoin and learn how to do transactions using them.