When I see such things two conclusions come to my mind:

1. The developers of tools like youtube-dl are the good guys, those at Google are the bad guys. There's no other way to put it. If you force all of the creators on your platform into a "partner program" that slaps ads on all of their videos, even if they don't want to, and you take all of their revenue away, knowing that creators won't leave you anyway because you're the biggest player in the market that provides them with access to the widest audience, then you're hurting both creators and consumers for your personal profit, while abusing your dominant position. On top of it, they take away the revenue generated by content created by someone else, just like a century-old music major would do, and when you put things in perspective (small YouTube channel that struggles to make a few hundred bucks per month vs. gargantuan corporation that belongs to the exclusive trillion dollar club) you realize how expectedly and banally greedy evil the former "don't be evil" company has become. And instead of listening to all the cries for changing their business model, Google is simply trying to force the world to swallow their outdated ads-based business model, proving that, after all, they're nothing more than a mediocre ads company, not a tech company that still likes to risk and innovate. In the face of so much evil piracy isn't only a right: it's a civic duty to remind those fuckers that it doesn't matter how many technological restrictions they decide to implement to force us to swallow their ads and how many repos they take down. We've also got brilliant engineers on the other side of the barricade, and we'll ALWAYS find clever ways to bypass their dumb restrictions. It's probably just not the best use of engineering resources on both sides. We'd love to spend our engineering time building things instead of reverse engineering the new authentication flow of YouTube in order to get that damn direct video URL. And Google engineers had better invest their time building a new infrastructure that offers fair payments to creators, instead of finding new ways to make people swallow their ads in spite of our scrapers.

2. Creators need to get the fuck out of YouTube. I know, it's hard because they'd lose access to a huge audience, but if nobody ever wins the initial inertia then things won't change, and the Evil Corp will keep bullying everyone. Platforms like Nebula and Curiosity Stream have proved that people are happy to pay a subscription to access premium ads-free content. And platforms like Vimeo and Twitch also offer access to a wide audience. And more platforms can be experimented too, perhaps based on micro-payments or affordable subscription models in order to both create revenue and offer creators anything more than the spare cash from ads revenue. And at some point we should consider a "video aggregator" that works pretty much like an RSS aggregator, listing videos on multiple platforms (after all, they're nothing more than URLs to mp4 files) to make sure that none of the other video platforms becomes the next YouTube. We need consumers and creators to seriously boycott YouTube and let other platforms build enough momentum. That's the only way to make an evil company that only cares about ads revenue change its mind.