This project seems to be merging most of what comes its way, but it's not what YT-DL needs now. It needs certainty, security and accountability showing that this isn't harmful fork, there is real person behind the project. You're not getting it by accepting PR that have title "ignore." or "ignore the second.." or by merging 20PR in 8 days.
The original author moved to gitlab and started GPG signing commits with his real GPG key. This gives packagers certainty they can replace old github links with new gitlab links, it tells us this project hasn't been compromised and is safe to be redistributed, unlike blackjack4494/yt-dlc
This fork has existed for a long time (under blackjack4494), it isn't some random fork. I don't believe it merges PRs just randomly either, it's just a more active maintainer. This is explained on the README.
I'm not totally sure which tool I should use, but I'm leaning towards the fork, because it has more support in general, and has fixed things faster.
I think the question was about where development of the original youtube-dl was happening since there is a new release, not "which fork do you like the best."
