I don’t think a fork will solve anything. I’m pretty sure the reason they did this is to cover their asses (don’t forget that it was very near to being taken down just a few years ago).

Further, yt-dlp has implemented plugin support, for this exact reason. I think that’s a new feature compared to youtube-dl. You can add your own extractors as plugins, wherever you find them. As I remember there are a few plugins that are even maintained by a yt-dlp maintainer.

If you find this to be ok or better, please consider changing the title to let those know about what’s happening who have already read the post, because they wouldn’t know it otherwise.