youtube-dl broken by youtube?

i am working on creating a new script that runs youtube-dl smarter than my previous script. i am encountering failures when it accesses www.youtube.com. i switched back to my previous script, which works but is harder to use and i get the same failure. i tried 3 different URLs and all fail. when i access them on Firefox, they work. is YouTube now detecting youtube-dl and blocking it? maybe this is why they let GITHUB put youtube-dl back up. here is my output with URLs obscured since they are private music videos.
Code:[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-k', '--verbose', '--extract-audio', '--audio-format', 'mp3', '--audio-quality', '0', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxXxXxXxXxX']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out UTF-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] youtube-dl version 2020.07.28
[debug] Python version 3.6.9 (CPython) - Linux-5.4.0-56-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-18.04-bionic
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 3.4.8, ffprobe 3.4.8, phantomjs 2.1.1, rtmpdump 2.4
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube] XxXxXxXxXxX: Downloading webpage
ERROR: XxXxXxXxXxX: YouTube said: Unable to extract video data
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 797, in extract_info
ie_result = ie.extract(url)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 530, in extract
ie_result = self._real_extract(url)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py", line 1893, in _real_extract
'YouTube said: %s' % unavailable_message, expected=True, video_id=video_id)
youtube_dl.utils.ExtractorError: XxXxXxXxXxX: YouTube said: Unable to extract video dataedit:

i don't want to submit a case to yt-dl.org if it is a mistake of my own. if youtube is blocking, i'm sure they will hear about it.