Not at all, I've been installing the latest releases of youtube-dl from PyPI via pip for years. In fact, it's still there. The RIAA takedown has had no effect (so far) on my usage of youtube-dl. The RIAA clearly doesn't have any understanding about how open source Python programs are commonly distributed.

Their actual goal is to harass and threaten developers to chill down development of such tools

That's not wrong, but it is missing the point: Ongoing development is impeded by the takedown. That means the tool will not work anymore in the near future, rendering it useless.

(Not here, my distro has a backports repo, and I'd suspect a significant if not majority of users get it from a repo of some sort, distro or not).

And even then, where are users going to search the most recent version? You will definitely not preserve the same number of users if you switch from yt-dl being "one apt-get away/one FDroid install away/one pip install away" to "one bittorrent search/wget from shady .ru website". And let's not talk about how will people contribute. The project could be as good as dead.

I'm on a rolling distro and I still maintained my own copy of youtube-dl (with a cronjob to run `youtube-dl -U`) instead of using my distro's package. If I used my distro's package, every time it broke I would have to wait a few days for my distro to update its package with the fix, even though upstream would've cut a release with the fix within a few hours.