Judging by the amount of work that's being done on youtube that does nothing but make things harder for third party tools, without bringing any benefit to anything or anyone else, that might not be far from the truth. :)
To me Google's actions wrt yt-dlp seem to be more of the "look here mr. music industry, we're doing something" rather than a serious attempt at blocking it.
Google is in strong enough position against the music industry that they could just tell them off, because where else is the music industry going to go?
