Ah, the joy of open source.
Of the 20K issues on https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues i can only find one where someone (indirectly) asked for this: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/17072. And it has no upvotes at all, and simply isn’t on our radar.
If this is a showstopper for you, please upvote it. (It’d also be a fairly easy PR if anyone wanted to help out).
I find it hard to believe that not showing video previews from links is a breaking issue for a lot of users. But I get your point that Matrix is kind of complex in some ways. Federation surely doesn't help to combat complexity.
Re:Adopting Matrix at the Gnome Foundation
by DoItToMe81 on Sunday May 01, 2022 @12:11PM
(#31226182)
By no means is it a breaking issue, but it's one of quite a few issues which make it very difficult, at least in my experience, to convince anyone from services that do have them (typically Discord) to use it.
It's hard to speak in earnest about the benefits of Matrix when you know the people you're talking to will immediately view it as a downgrade, and from the user's perspective in many ways won't even be wrong.
Matrix, meanwhile, is complex in some places and simple in others all in the wrong ways. For all of its features, all major clients still lack the capability for video previews from links, something that has been a feature in forums for as long as I can remember now.