Not really. The thing that makes youtube-dl useful is that it has one large dedicated community that can find ways to circumvent the changes youtube adds to prevent scraping. Basically, every few months or so youtube-dl becomes useless, and a huge distributed team has to kick in and find a way around it. When one of them does, they commit the change to one centralized place and it gets disbursed to everyone.

Without one centralized place, propagation of patches would take a lot longer, and youtube-dl would spend a larger percentage of time not working for most people. This is something the anti-piracy folks would be quite OK with, as it would lead to attrition among users even if not total eradication.

git is a decentralized vcs

How did Googs put pressure on Microsoft to have Github change their mind? What concern was it of Goog's?

Google owns Youtube and youtube-dl doesn't serve google ads?

wow, total brain fart. of course. makes mental note to not be so quick to post right before bed

youtube-dl users probably are tiny drop among the adblock users who also do not see ads. And Google does not care about adblock.

I assume google cares about people who block ads because a month or so ago, google figured out how to show ads even though I am using a content blocker on iOS and macOS.

Will probably work on manifest v3 chrome then too

I don't think so. Disabling ads on youtube requires injecting JavaScript. It's not forbidden in manifest v3 (and it would be absurd to forbid it, as 99% extensions exist because of this).

For reference: I don't see ads on youtube using hand-crafted JS which was inspired by uBlock origin, so I think that uBlock origin should work as well.