[roughly]

You’d be shocked at how hard it is to fund, start, and ship even a basic project at a company the size of YT or anything else in the Google/Alphabetaverse. It’s probably also a legal landmine and all that, but organizational friction’s more than sufficient to explain simple useful features failing to ship.

[satvikpendem]

Don't forget how Google incentivizes projects, one gets promoted for shipping the project, not for maintaining it. If indeed this were shipped at YouTube, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets slowly deprecated or outright shuttered in a few years. It's better to keep it open source for everyone.