It's an Xposed module, so yeah, I have it and I'm rooted. I'm on Android 7.1.2.
Unfortunately this was pulled from the Xposed repository because it technically allows you to get a feature of YouTube Red for free, which I feel is incredibly dumb as allowing YouTube to run in the background (and with the screen locked) does not affect monetary gain for any party; the uploader isn't affected nor is Google. It doesn't allow one to get YouTube Red content for free or anything like that. It's completely asinine that Google would complain about this. Them doing so kind of implies that background playback is a major selling point for Red subscriptions and that people don't actually care about the content, which is sad.
I honestly can't be bothered to spin up a VM just for this. If I compiled Android related stuff on the regular I'd consider it, but it's good to know that this distribution exists. I was entirely unaware of it. I use OS X primarily so it's not like I don't have a UNIX environment to work with. It'd be super easy to setup what I need. I just don't want to setup the Android SDK and all that for one thing and never use it again.