> But if you try to download in significant volume, their systems know it's automated and probably have signatures specifically for yt-dlp.
Well, the big G is not going to sit around and watch it being scraped
Of course not! But my question/point is why they allow a little bit to be scraped at all?
Obviously, the YouTube team is aware of yt-dlp, and with Google's engineering density, a small team can completely block it & win in the cat-n-mouse game against community volunteers that make all their code public.