... Hi ; most unfortunately, this isn't how things work ; Google , the owners of YouTube, have unleashed a war of annihilation against every kind of YT downloaders and they're NOT excluding/pardoning any of them based on the OS they're compatible with ; and, trust me, every breaking change Google implement (on purpose) isn't meant to leave "older" versions of downloaders unscathed ...
XP-compatibility in Q4 of 2025 is also a concern for many Windows apps, not only Video Downloaders... I tend to stay clear of GUI media downloaders, so, alas, if you're in search for one of them, I'm afraid I won't be the person to recommend one to you... My own experience is that most of the GUI YT downloaders are frontends of the well-known CLI (Python) apps youtube-dl and its fork, yt-dlp; the GUI apps either use the standalone youtube-dl.exe or yt-dlp.exe binaries under the hood or use the respective libs inside their source code; as a consequence, whenever Google break youtube-dl/yt-dlp, the apps become broken, too ...
Recently, Google implemented a breaking change of a great magnitude, which should explain your observation that
yt-dlp and youtube-dl were impacted/broken, too, a stop-gap/interim solution has been implemented for both, but they were actually "stitched back together with duct tape", meaning they can break again at any time...
More permanent solutions for YouTube downloading in those apps will leave, probably, any WinOS < Win10 uncovered (too early to tell with absolute certainty, maybe Win7 will be spared, but things are very grim for XP/Vista ) ; at the time of this writing, working versions can be found at:
https://github.com/ytdl-org/ytdl-nightly/releases/download/2025.09.29/youtube-dl.exe
(official nightly version)
https://github.com/nicolaasjan/youtube-dl/releases/download/2025.09.29/youtube-dl.exe
(fork of the above with a few custom modifications)
https://github.com/nicolaasjan/yt-dlp/releases/download/2025.09.27.071342/yt-dlp_x86_winXP.exe
If you're not familiar with those two CLI apps, am afraid this isn't the place to ask for help; however, ample HowTos can be found online with a simple web search, both apps have detailed wiki sections (assuming one already knows to invoke apps from the Windows command prompt) ...
For developments related to both youtube-dl+yt-dlp, keep an eye on the dedicated MSFN thread:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/184368-who-here-has-a-youtube-dl-compile-for-winxp
Best regards ...