When Handbrake first came around, it installed DeCSS since it was meant to convert DVD media. Because of that, I was not allowed to use it at corp job. At some point Handbrake changed to not include DeCSS, but if you had VLC installed it would use the library provided by the VLC install. This met our lawyer's approval and allowed us to use Handbrake vX.X and higher only.

Just an anecdotal story about how software that offends lawyers can become acceptable by making certain changes. I hope the suggested changes to YT-dl will allow it to pass lawyer's smell test.