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Afaik it's used more for circumventing anti-bot measures and solving challenges than the download handling itself.

This is accurate (maintainer of downstream project that depends on yt-dlp for archiving operations).

Yes, that's what I meant; if the download is going to take minutes, then a fem milliseconds spent doing the challenge don't matter much?

I believe the parent comment is saying the js runtime doesnt affect the speed of downloads, thats all c/c++/rust code

When downloading huge media files, the only speed you're being limited by is your bandwidth.

Everything else is completely negligible.

What makes Deno more suitable for this than any other runtime? It's just executing JS code right? I wouldn't think this would leave any meaningful fingerprint.

Sanboxing makes it more suitable.

yt-dlp executes code from the website to get the exact download URLs and header values. The websites obfuscate these to prevent downloading. Running arbitrary 3rd party code in Node or Bun might work, but is risky, especially when that code could potentially come from one of the many ads on that video website.