Pretty much every western country has implemented the WIPO treaties equivalent to the DMCA. You can't flaunt copyright law without causing headache for the vast majority of contributors.

The productive next step is to make youtube-dl compliant with copyright law, namely by removing the TPM-circumventing code from youtube-dl (`YoutubeIE._decrypt_signature`), and making the marketing material reflect that it's designed for non-infringing or exempted uses only. Unfortunately, you can't 'put the genie back in the bottle', so it's unlikely the original authors can continue to be contributors.

In the long term, put energy into reforming copyright law.