yt-dlp doesn't need to be installed, you can download the binary from GitHub and run it without installing. You might say that a restricted environment really really should prevent running binaries just downloaded from the Internet, and I agree (malware could do many nasty things to a user's home folder without needing to request admin access), but some people think merely preventing admin access is enough. So for anyone under that kind of restricted computing environment, yt-dlp used to run just fine until Google's changes to Youtube forced them to add a Deno requirement. (Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.)
> Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.
A third party is packaging it for PyPI (although yt-dlp doesn't support this, nobody has properly verified it etc.) and the wheel looks to be just a monolithic executable and a "tell me the executable path" wrapper (much like the official PyPI package for uv), so I would assume it can.
