That's part of the red flags i was trying to tell you. They could have added more maintainers years ago, but they didn't. It's almost 3 months now without a commit and even now still no new maintainer.This is why they forked it. This is not new, this is why they are 800 open PRs that accumulated over years. The project is in serious neglect, yet they are no shortage of willing volunteers.
Your guess on what is going through their heads, is as good as mine. This is why i'm saying it's dead. And this is why i called this bug grave, because it's upstream it self that is dead, it's not just a technical issue. It will require packaging a fork, the proposed yt-dlp. Even if it came back to life the general state of neglect will almost certainly continue.
