> to prevent automatic downloading

To prevent all downloading, not just automatic. When they remove a video, they don't want you to have an archived copy to prove the content ever existed, or to watch it without their permission.

Actually, youtube-dl is dead at the moment for reasons of private life of the maintainer. So people now use a fork called yt-dlp. Which is ironic, because most people moved when google started to use a new harsh speed-limitation.

Thanks for that. I don’t watch many YouTube videos but when I do, I usually use youtube-dl as provided by the Debian Testing package. I wasn’t aware of the yt-dlp project¹ and I’d been wondering why the video downloads were so slow over the past few weeks.

¹ https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Does yt-dlp fix the speed limitation problems?

Yup!