YouTube-dl dead? Latest commit on Jul 1, 2021

And this is the summer holidays in the Northern hemisphere. The #2 and #4 committers are in Europe, where many people take a month off.

You therefore need to look at the commit rate last year.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/graphs/commit-activit... only goes back a year, but does show that last August had only 0 or 1 commits per week.