Sure, there is value to corporate top-down synchronization telling everyone to focus on a specific piece of media at the same time. I wasn't really complaining about that. In fact it would be interesting if we could recreate the effect some way in a more distributed culture.

But no, in my experience yt-dlp no longer just works unless you make your identity legible to Google (eg naive residential IP or supplying a logged-in session cookie).

> But no, in my experience yt-dlp no longer just works unless you make your identity legible

You need to upgrade your yt-dlp then. The newest versions still work without any session cookies or other such nonsense.