Presumably the point of the action is to disrupt the ongoing development of youtube-dl, not delete the code from the internet. I don't know much about the codeb

Presumably the point of the action is to disrupt the ongoing development of youtube-dl, not delete the code from the internet. I don't know much about the codebase, but I assume that YouTube could put time into breaking compatibility if it was known that the project had lost momentum and couldn't keep up. It takes a lot of effort to keep up with a well funded organisation - see NewPipe, etc. Of course you don't need GitHub to run an open source software project, you could conceivably do it with IPoAC[1] if you really wanted to. But in the real world, being kicked off the most popular platform of its kind, and losing the community and integrations that come with it, is going to slow the project down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers