I'm trying to make sense of the manifest files myself in this regard.
I've been attempting to use various different methods for downloading
Steam CDN chunks and manifest files, and so far this and one other
have been successful in getting the chunks and manifest data. The only
thing I've noticed is that the manifest files between this and the
other are not the same size, even though they appear to contain the
same data when using either to download the same chunks from a single
depot/manifest. Both are zip files, both have the same data, but for
whatever reason, they are just downloaded as different sizes. I'm
wondering if this is solely due to the older PythonSteam repo and will
be rectified if/when the new one is found to sufficiently replace the
old one.