The unlisting from GitHub was precisely due to the reason I mentioned, and Nat Friedman himself, CEO of GitHub at the time, dropped into the youtube-dl development IRC, assured the team that he had their back, and that the moment the infringing test was fixed, he would personally restore access, which he did posthaste.

Regarding the website being taken down, it was hosted in Germany and it was a German court order. Germany is notorious for this stuff, and it should never have been hosted there. If they wanted, they could have found a more reasonable host.

I understand the burnout, but it comes with the territory, and powerful enough people made it clear that the team did have their support. With some effort, the project could have continued on at full pace at least as uninhibited as its forks.

Now the URL just redirects to the yt-dlp GitHub repository, anyway.