To add to what you said, the formula came back a week and a half later when they returned to tagging releases.
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/82a45025682...
Re:Homebrew 3.0
by LiberatedLlama on Friday February 05, 2021 @12:19PM
(#26038655)
I suppose their hand was probably forced by Apple in some way, but simply offering binary downloads for mpv in particular is subpar. There are a lot of unusual options for mpv that, in my experience, don't get pulled into prebuilt binaries. For instance, last I checked, the prebuilt packages for mpv from homebrew didn't have librubberband support. LibRubberband is great, but to effectively integrate it into your workflow you need some userscripts that mpv doesn't ship with, so many users (including packagers evidently) may not see the value in it. When I was still using MacOS, I had to build mpv myself to enable it. My memory is hazy, but I think libarchive support was in a similar situation. Eventually I cut homebrew out of the picture and chose to build mpv myself, since homebrew wasn't helping at all, just getting in the way.
I think it's a fair conflict, too. For a package manager, saying "just download and compile master wherever it is right now" is rough, and I can understand them not wanting to have to look at mpv's repo and pick a good commit to pin as their "release". Offloading picking a stable release point to someone else is legitimate.