Or maybe we can take the current approach and leave a sensible default for the people who aren't savvy enough? And people like you and I can just toggle the option?

Do the majority really want autoplay? Facebook forced it on people and made it hard to find the disable option.

On pages that I go to specifically to play a media file, yes. Maybe a reasonable middle ground would be that each page can auto-play a single video element?

There are probably uses that I'm not thinking of (or don't partake in) where this would still be a problem for people.