[sphars]

You can 100% download higher quality audio tracks from YouTube using yt-dlp. You have to use session cookies from a browser that you've logged into your premium account with to get the higher quality tracks. There are options with yt-dlp to help with this.

[plausibility]

This is kind of the confusion I mean. Sometimes YouTube Music has audio tracks that you are seemingly different to the "X Artist - Topic" videos you can find on YouTube proper. I'll have to revisit this again to see if it's all the same now, because the last time I was looking into it a few years ago not everything I had organised in playlists on YTM was available via regular YouTube playlists I could rip with yt-dlp.