Comment by margana

Piracy isn't even the main use case of yt-dlp. It's archival of videos that you want to keep a copy of in case something happens to the video. There is literally no way to get that "feature" by paying Google. But you are correct that yt-dlp would not be necessary if Google offered an option to download videos (also in an automated way because many people have something set up to archive certain videos automatically).