I believe youtube-dl are just slower at accepting merges. For example yt-dlp were the first to mitigate youtube’s speed throttling and idk if the base project has it even now. It’s still functional but may be slower.

To be frank i haven’t found much use for peertube yet. All my creators are still on youtube. If you’re interested in linux, gaming and open source there are the linux experiment, gaming on linux, the linux cast and Veronica explains but they all mirror their videos from youtube.

You won’t find youtube content on there. Like with reddit and lemmy, creators and users have to switch to bolster engagement.

Discourse also has a fedi plugin, although it’s not finished yet afaik