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Scraping an unwilling system is already essentially illegal, there's a long case history on this. It's only recently starting to change (via pure judicial activism) in HiQ v. LinkedIn. As written, the CFAA allows anyone to make a felon out of a persistent scraper.

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https://www.rcfp.org/scraping-not-violation-cfaa/

> A federal appeals court last week issued a “hugely important” decision with potentially major implications for data journalists when it held that using computer programs to collect publicly available information from the internet — or “scraping” — likely does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the main federal computer crime statute.

Links are in the quoted text.

The CFAA has nothing to do with copyright and that finding would only be relevant if the youtube-dl authors (or users) were being criminally prosecuted under the CFAA.

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