> ... current release on windows is broken ... You grumble and give up

No, you just scroll further down on the GitHub releases page (or whatever) and grab an older version that does work, same as every other platform.

For yt-dlp in particular, on a recent x64 or ARM64 kernel you could grab the precompiled Linux binaries and skip the compile the same way, if you wanted. They ship self-contained static linked binaries on Linux.