Notably, youtube-dl is currently offered as a static binary that doesn't require Python to be installed. It would be a shame to loose that.

Presumably that's a blob that bundles the python runtime, pip dependencies, and ytdl itself? You could do the same thing, with the various "plugins" added to the pip dependency list.

...good point, not sure what I was thinking there. I'm pretty sure it's just pyinstaller, which can certainly handle bundling dependencies.