I agree with you that yt-dlp is the most practical way to do this stuff, but that simply isn't clear to most folks.

Pretend you don't know how to download videos, the first thing you do is google "how to download youtube videos". The result? A whole lot of bad advice-- sketchy websites, clickbait videos, advice to pay for youtube premium, warnings that it's illegal and that google can cut off your access, vlc player can do it apparently, and then finally inside a reddit thread someone writes "yt-dlp is the best" (nothing else, no link). One would think that google itself has an interest in keeping this information away from people :-).

I can't even remember how I first found it myself!