The issue is that anything that scales needs an infrastructure and infrastructures can be extralegal only if they are not worth the time of the guys with the guns.
youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways, and they specifically took down the code repository. On top of that youtube-dl is a commandline tool. This is not your typical "google how do I netflix" end-user.
You can bootstrap an application that is hosted on tor or i2p with a short bash script: 1. download and start tor/i2p, 2. download the application, 3. run it.
youtube-dl already has a built-in updater (youtube-dl -U). You'd just change that to use tor/i2p as well.
Anyone who can't get such a script to run wouldn't have been able to use youtube-dl anyways.
This is just speculation, but I think that there may have been a tipping point reached where it is no longer being just used by CLI "techies". It has been incorporated into other tools which appeal to a much wider userbase - many of whom will never know they are using it behind the scenes.
For example, there is: a user-friendly front-end for it in Kodi [1], an easy to use web interface [2], a polished desktop app [3], etc.
I suspect it's not so much the original CLI which they care about, but the lowering of the barrier to entry for "everyone else".
[1] https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl [2] https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube [3] https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM
Of course you don't need GitHub to run an open source software project, you could conceivably do it with IPoAC[1] if you really wanted to. But in the real world, being kicked off the most popular platform of its kind, and losing the community and integrations that come with it, is going to slow the project down.
Also you pretty much gave a counterexample to your own argument by bringing up TPB.
The "people with guns" would love nothing more than for it to go away, yet here we are - 17 years and counting.
It’s the same situation with your homebrew unlawful stuff. As long as your impact is not worth the attention of the guys with the guns you can do whatever you want.
As long as one can google "thing" + "torrent" and come up with something in the first few result, it's pretty obvious who isn't winning.
Then there's also the actual statistics for torrent usage...
Sure they can take down a pirate bay or some other tracker now and again, but at the end of the day for each site they take down there will be 10 new ones.
And that's what I'm talking about when I'm saying "pretty much any policy can be made unenforceable if a sufficient number of people decide to make it so."
The best efforts of those people with guns are proverbial drops in the ocean.
What always happens when laws and reality aren't in alignment, is that people ignore those laws en masse.
No, there are magnets now. You can send a torrent as a hash.
The reason it won't work is because you can just take that hash, log all of the swarm ips, send secret letters to all of the isps to reveal the seeders and leechers, bust in their doors and arrest them, publicize their arrests in every newspaper and on every television channel, interrogate them to expose more of the network, then if the law lags create parallel constructions to convict the most important people as the ringleaders of a copyright-violating cartel, and let the rest languish in jail for a little while before dropping the charges six months later and releasing them after their names have been in the paper.
Media companies monitor torrents, and as soon as they see a new German ip address seeding, they send a letter to the ISP with the IP address and timestamp. The ISPs send the law firm the real user address and then they send you a letter demanding a fine for illegally uploading copyrighted material often between 1000-3000€. If you don't pay up, they take you to court.
This is quite common and many people see letters even if they only seed for a few seconds. Apparently the easiest way is to just ignore the letters and pretend you don't live there but I wouldn't be so sure (a friend told me that's what he did and it allegedly worked but I have no experience with either).
So this is a lot less drastic but still quite as effective. And it even makes VPNs risky because disconnecting and exposing your real IP for even one second is enough to receive that letter (though not all torrents are monitored and private torrents are usually safe because the German RIAA doesnt have access to it).
I recommend you take a look at the Wikipedia about "Abmahnung" how that is even possible when the copyright holders don't sue themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung
My experience is that instead most people switched to Netflix, Spotify, YouTube (et al.) because they were more convenient and cheap enough, and the MAFIAA mostly stopped caring about torrents.
And people that were worried about getting fined started using VPNs/seedboxes.
I still haven't heard of anyone in my circles getting a fine.
It doesn't happen as much anymore because it's now easier to get a high-quality version of the movie through legitimate means than through illegitimate ones.
The RIAA and MPAA are aggressive, but they're not stupid.