Thank you, I found this way before I saw your reply, although I have to sudo to run this installation of yt-dlp, which seems not ideal from a security perspective:

wget https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp -O ~/Downloads/yt-dlp
chmod a+rx ~/Downloads/yt-dlp
sudo mv -v ~/Downloads/yt-dlp /usr/local/bin sudo yt-dlp --update
yt-dlp --version

Since you went to the effort and I do want to understand my system better, I will study your explanation closely even though my video downloading woes are solved.