I'm pretty happy with Downie (and Permute to directly convert media to whatever format I like). So far it downloads everything I throw at it. And you can create custom download handlers (using JavaScript) to make it work (without interaction) with sites that are currently not supported and would spawn the user-interactive downloader.
If you just want to download and don't care about a nice GUI, yt-dlp
probably has similar features.
Does the paper take into account the energy required to compile the code, the complexity of debugging and thus the required re-compilations after making small changes? Because IMHO that should all be part of the equation.