It’s annoying but I guess they’re just evolving their anti spam mechanisms, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

JS is one of the most popular scripting languages anyway so having it as a requirement shouldn’t hinder anyone.

And not to throw shade at the people who designed yt-dlp, but designing a tool to “scrap” the content of an evolving platform in a different language (with different tooling etc) than the one which it’s expecting to be consumed by might have been a mistake