I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)

▲

basilikum 7 hours ago | parent [-]

yt-dlp needs to get the stream from somewhere. It has to fetch the website for that and even execute a JavaScript challenge to retrieve the media endpoint.

	▲	netsharc 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...