Lagging behind on upstream updates?

Disclaimer: I am not a software developer. I am a comp sci dropout who works at geek squad and is a nerdy person.

I choose to get yt-dlp via apt because it is more convenient to run "apt update && apt upgrade" than it is to go through a handful of different package managers and look at what packages they're updating. I think that the .deb for yt-dlp is more or less a wrapper for the underlying python. Which is fine.

I understand that despite Debian and Ubuntu using the same packaging system, they are not the same. That being said, the Debian Bookworm AND Bullseye backports packages for yt-dlp have been updated to 2022.11.11-1 since November 12th 2022. Clearly, unit193 (the maintainers of the Debian package) find it stable enough to include in a backport.

It's been 15 days since this change upstream. If the launchpad package merges from here, why has it taken so long? If it instead merges from the source, what's taking so long?

As I've mentioned, I am not a software developer, however I am more than willing to learn and collaborate with unit193 (or whoever it would be) to maintain a version of the .deb of yt-dlp that would work for amd64 architectures of Ubuntu 22.04 and 22.10 (I don't think the platform matters too much though, as the source code is entirely Python). I can be contacted at <email address hidden>.