There are a lot of arguments against this counter example, including the fact that the browser does not facilitate you getting access in any other way than originally intended (legal) and it honors the caching policy defined for the resource (technical)

I would counter argue that if you are able to use youtube-dl you can explore the cache

The opposite cannot be taken for granted

But usually someone with very little technical knowledge can find files on their hard disks

It requires more than that to be able to run youtube-dl from the shell

The technical argument is even weaker, there are dozens of browser extensions that inject a "download video" button in video on demand websites

Video downloader professional has over 230k users, it can't download YouTube videos anymore because Chrome blocked it, because Chrome and YouTube are Google's and they don't care if you download videos, they only care about their videos, that show their ads, that make their money

youtube-dl serves a niche, a tiny one

What RIAA is doing is scaring people off from even trying, because the truth is that the real money is on mobile where youtube-dl doesn't exists...

BTW youtube-dl is a f*ng good piece of software, it should be praised not blocked

Meanwhile people will keep using JDownloader

Is this still true with DASH because last I heard (which was admittedly ages ago) they break the video up into small chunks now