I believe they have the actual videos to download, "exclusively for academic and non-commercial research." and you have to request access, https://projects.laion.ai/bvd/bvd-raw-access.html
They say they used yt-dlp and "employ a residential proxy network". But, yeah, youtube seems to now more aggressively block yt-dlp.
Ha, is it just me or does a “residential proxy network” sound like a fancy way of saying “botnet”?
That’s a pretty penny on the bandwidth bill alone!