The steelman is that Widevine is a DRM platform; to tell the difference between a browser and a ripper application it needs a lot of knowledge about the context in which it's meant to run, and how to tell the difference between a 'real' Chrome that follows the licensing rules and a fork of Chrome that doesn't. It should have been obvious to Maddock that he wouldn't be allowed to do this: I'm not sure why it's come up as an issue as a result.

As for Electron, are you sure? I found this page:

https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm

It says:

To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses from widevine.

So there's a fork of Electron that enables you to embed Widevine, if and only if you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron fork would be detected as a stream ripper).

Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's the entire point of the Widevine system.

As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".