Sounds like an exhausting thing to maintain. It's not like writing scraping (or even just changing slight variations in an API) is terribly interesting.
True, but it’s also the kind of product that’s instantly useful and itch-scratchy. Youtube-dl not working on the video you’re downloading today? Well if you’re a maintainer you can just patch it yourself. (Non-maintainers can too of course, but I imagine the maintainers have the know-how to actually fix things)