[0-_-0]

Very unlikely, you need the browser for that

[petcat]

I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)

[basilikum]

yt-dlp needs to get the stream from somewhere. It has to fetch the website for that and even execute a JavaScript challenge to retrieve the media endpoint.

[estimator7292]

Good thing yt-dlp is a browser.

[direwolf20]

It's not. It runs enough JavaScript to pass the CAPTCCA (completely automated public turing test to tell computers and computers apart) challenge but it doesn't actually load the page and execute everything.