I use it daily and it is updated by the devs on most days.
Silly statement. I explicitly said youtube-dl was an exception. Frequency of update and it is only a single file.
Not about trust at all, maintainers have busy lives like the rest of us, when I first started using it many years ago the package was mostly out of date. It is only one file and updated with a simple command, so I started doing it manually.
If things are different now then great, that is a good thing, it was not always the case.
Manually updating daily you are never one or two days behind and youtube-dl always works. The minute a dev patch is released to fix any Google YouTube whack-a-mole shenigans you can update instantly.
Like I said, youtube-dl is an exception to the rule.