How to get publicly available captions for YouTube videos

I want to get publicly available captions (even if auto-generated) for publicly available YouTube videos. I found a lot of ways suggested here, but none of them seem to work as of now (April 2025).

Specifically:

• /timedtext stopped working in 2021
• YouTube Data V3 API doesn't allow downloading captions unless you are authenticated via OAuth 2.0 and are the owner of the video
• Libraries such as youtube_transcript_api seem to sometimes fail the "bot" test if they are used from servers

The only way to get the captions now, it seems, is to run a headless browser and scrape the page directly. But this is not a very reliable way to do this, nor is it a particularly attractive one on a big scale.

So, I was wondering if there is any official (doesn't matter paid or free) or more reliable way of getting the captions today?