It's super important to do it in a way that either a) prevents the Google account and/or IP address to be marked as a spammer or something, or b) can be done anonymously without a Google account.
There's no rush, so the process can be done slow enough to not trigger anything at YouTube/Google. It can e.g. be done in batches over some weeks, if that's necessary.
I'm not a great programmer, so the simpler/more automated, the better.
Any and all ideas are welcome. Thanks!
- FILE is a text file with a list of YouTube id's/URL's
The requirement to make it not tied to a Google account rules out what would be my preferred method of getting these via the YT API.
I think there are some open source git repos that already do what you're asking (e.g. https://github.com/egbertbouman/youtube-comment-downloader) but I haven't personally tried any of these.