12 tries to get it to work. it is a timing issue. not too soon and not too late. you are likely a fraction to slow when you click it.
What timing did you use that worked? I've tried starting at 0:00:00 (maybe 0.2 seconds after the whole hour), I've tried submitting clicking captcha at that point. None of it works, it takes about 10 seconds for the page to load, it's probably heavily overloaded by bots at that time.
I just tried again: at a fraction of a second I clicked "FREE Submission", I beat 88% of the users with the captcha, but I was too late.
At very least, creating and trading Ordinals would be more difficult or annoying.
I don't think it's many people doing it, my guess is it's a small group of people creating millions of them, with automated systems. And I have no idea how they make many from it.