[1] a collection of cases: https://github.com/HiddenStrawberry/Crawler_Illegal_Cases_In...
It might be the case, but the repo you linked doesn't support that claim very well, and the cases cited are largely irrelevant to the case at hand.
"Forbidden area #1: providing scraping-related services to criminal organizations". Three cases listed. The first is one programmer's personal account of being arrested, which is very scant on why; the only info I can glean: "I developed some sort of ML API which is then used by a criminal enterprise against some influential company for god knows what purpose". Hard to draw any conclusion from that. The second case is ML-based CAPTCHA bypass for credential stuffing against Tencent QQ, emphasis on credential stuffing. The third case is some sort of black hat SEO campaign against Baidu, the scraping part (if any?) doesn't seem central to the conviction.
"Forbidden area #2: scraping and sale of personal info". Common sense, irrelevant.
"Forbidden area #3: commercial use of unlicensed business data" and the following untitled category list three cases, all of which are mass scraping operations either from a business competitor or that seriously affects site operations (through aggressive scraping).
AFAIK there are a lot of low hanging fruits in the Chinese piracy scene not yet targeted, and there are enough small-time commercial operations involving copyrighted media products begging to be taken down, it's highly unlikely anyone will bother to target some high-barrier-of-entry tool mostly facilitating the download of otherwise public videos.
> it's highly unlikely anyone will bother to target some high-barrier-of-entry tool mostly facilitating the download of otherwise public videos
It's true that any particular violation is unlikely to be prosecuted because there are so many, but youtube-dl is already being targeted, so if it stays up on Gitee (or Gitlab, for that matter), then only because RIAA doesn't file a complaint.
> only because RIAA doesn't file a complaint
Pretty sure RIAA/MPAA aren’t targeting China (yet), it’s still a bittorrenting Wild West according to my Chinese sources. They’ll need lawyers specialized in Chinese law and be prepared to navigate a foreign legal system if they want to look that way, frivolous DMCA takedowns that they file hundreds a day won’t do.
The power of a legal threat lies in the fact that there could be follow-up legal action; it’s toothless if no legal action could follow.