Presumably this for now has only been seen for a specific tv client API that yt-dlp use and not all youtube videos (well, https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube/issues/4444 also saw it for "members-only" videos but again not all videos).

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Also I suppose you make a reference to software DRM like Widevine L3 vs L1 (same thing for PlayReady SL2000 vs SL3000) which is not exactly Firefox vs Chrome. Firefox has even be known to work on the availability of hardware DRM on windows right now, (through the Media Foundation API I think?).

In the worst scenarios seen right now for example seen on services like Netflix, would be to only have lower qualities (e.g. 480p max) on browsers with only Software DRM available (like firefox) and encrypt better qualities with keys only available when there is hardware DRM available. Though I'm not sure YouTube would go that far for now? Netflix, Amazon and such have contracts with right-holders stating those protections as a requirement, but YouTube does not have (IMO thankfully) the same kind of relation and contract with "Youtubers".

I think that what YouTube wants to do for now is to greatly lower the amount of people not watching contents through its website/app (and thus not seeing ads). I would even think that this is mostly not about yt-dlp users, but more the huge amount of people relying on some Youtube-to-mp3 website or similar accessible tools. Here enforcing software DRM would be enough to at least temporarily break all those tools and force those users to go back on the platform I guess, and maybe you can also sue some tools' developers once there is an "encryption breaking"-mechanism embedded in it (IANAL)?

> Though I'm not sure YouTube would go that far for now? Netflix, Amazon and such have contracts with right-holders stating those protections as a requirement, but YouTube does not have (IMO thankfully) the same kind of relation and contract with "Youtubers".

It does with the music labels, which is why said labels sued various YouTube downloaders for bypassing a technical protection measure in regards to the existing rolling cypher (but reading between the lines I suspect the labels intention was actually to lose that case, and then take that judgement to YouTube to show that they were in breach of the contract that required them to include some form of technical protection measure and hence adopt Widevine on all music streams).

The primary use of DRM is arguably to bring a system into legal DMCA scope.

Among other things, that would very likely be the end of yt-dlp being hosted on Github and maybe even being distributed via apt repositories, pip, homebrew etc.

I think the odds of that happening are remote, but there is prior art from other streaming services for only serving reduced quality to clients that don't support DRM, or to clients that they just don't seem to like.