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It’s about awareness, not distribution. How many people learned youtube-dl exists due to news about its takedown?

Their comment was not about distribution, but on going development.

It's easy for an individual site to break youtube-dl, and it happens often. Awareness/distribution don't matter if:

A) there is no central repository for updating the project//distributing updates B) threat of legal action deters maintainers from the project

It's a miracle that OSS ever was developed by large groups of people before github existed. /s

If individual developers are subject to lawsuits and harassment for their contributions, some may choose not to.