Sadly stuff like this makes me think Google is going to work even hard at preventing tools like YT-DL from working.

IMO data is Google's biggest moat in the AI race - and I suspect they'll do whatever they can to keep it.

Google's moat is deep ranks of machine learning engineers and top flight SWE talent, coupled with probably the best infrastructure in the business. Their data moat is weak, the data they can actually train on is mostly public, and people trying to prevent scraping are always on the losing end.

Meta is the one with the huge data moat.