To be precise, what seems to have gone wrong is that youtube-dl went down the "insane compatibility" road. The new maintainer has put demands in place to suppo

To be precise, what seems to have gone wrong is that youtube-dl went down the "insane compatibility" road. The new maintainer has put demands in place to support python 2.6 and up, which is fucking bonkers. Nevermind the fact that 2.6 is even deader than 2.7 ever was (which was the version of python2 officially deprecated three years ago). A side effect of this is that the new maintainer also rejects any patches that introduce new dependencies (existing ones being used is fine though), which has killed support since nobody wants to reimplement certain things to work with a python version that is pretty much only used by one guy still running Windows XP (who began to whine on the issue tracker about being ignored even though XP hasn't even been enterprise supported by Microsoft since 2019 but I guess this one guy is a valuable user?) yt-dlp on the other hand follows the "reasonable" road of compatibility, which is "current python3 version + 5 minor versions going back" (which is also the standard used for deprecating things in the python stdlib and security patches). Much better and it seems to have healthier contributors as a result.