Hm. Don't know how to respond to that. Let me explain how my usage began. Somewhen in the days of early Arch long before systemd...don't know how and why exactly I tried it. I mostly used mplayer before. Even with mplayer I've been wondering why I should use VLC over it, because anything I've thrown at mplayer just worked. While VLC had so many options for nothing I'd need. And it was bloated in direct comparison. Maybe that has changed meanwhile by change of toolkit, or whatever. IDK, not touching it. MPV feels like mplayer to me, with the difference of even less hassle for daily usage, and under active development, with the option of embedding it into several popular scripts to download/stream content from popular sites to watch it outside the browser/app or to archive it in the desired format and quality. Either from CLI or via several frontends. Which I have almost no use for. However, for my simple needs for local playing of downloaded stuff it just works for everything I throw at it, be it CLI, or click in some graphical filemanager. Instantly. Sometimes on even older systems than yours. With probably less RAM. Say 8GB, with something booted from USB, running 'live', so only 7GB, no SWAP. I wouldn't want to use VLC on that. If it's on the image, I remove it and exchange it for mpv during remastering.

Maybe you compiled yours with all the bells&whistles which aren't needed for sufficient local playback?

Furthermore I didn't cover (re-)streaming to chromecasts, TVs, or such. Don't have it, don't want it.