Comment by mdaniel

I recall that discussion recently, and thus just happen to have it handy:

a very, very specialized "regex" based JS evaluator that presumably did just enough to make the YT one run: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/2021.12.17/youtu...

and its callsite: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/2021.12.17/youtu...

So the short version is that I would not classify that as a VM, and I don't even believe it's obfuscated. Perhaps there are other extractors that do what you're describing, I didn't go looking