youtube-dl works right now, so not sure if this is a fair thing to say. But you might have more insight than me. Maybe they realized that becoming a famous project is only a detriment to their mission
Someone mailed the maintainer, and received a reply that he currently has "[..] no free time to spend on youtube-dl as I'm busy with work, ongoing renovation and other post-relocation stuff." [1]
It works only as long as you don't care how long it takes to download a video. youtube-dl has had a problem with bandwidth throttling on Youtube for some time now. yt-dlp does not.
[1]: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29965#issuecom...