> h.264 (and h.265) which made the breadth of codec support not as important anymore

You say that but just yesterday i used VLC to play some old videos i had which AFAICT were in RealVideo format or something like that.

And i transcode everything i want to watch in my Android tablet (where i also use VLC) to mpeg2 because the tablet is ancient (10+ years old) and can't handle anything newer, so i am glad that VLC a) still works on the ancient Android OS it has and b) still supports an old outdated but CPU light video format :-P.

I'm not saying it's useless. But now it's situational, which wasn't the case in the 2000s.

One could argue video players in general just lose relevance in an age of streaming ... And everything has definitely not crystallized around h.264. plenty of sources will give you widely different things, for instance digital cameras, webcam, even screen recorders. Basically most of the input is in completely different formats. If you were thinking about pirated movies then it is of course more the case, but I wouldn't think it is the biggest use case of VLC. I for one appreciate being able to read both Mac screen recordings and clips from my DSLR with the same software without installing a bunch of weird stuff.

    > slowly losing relevance

I love this type of editorializing language. Ok, if VLC is "slowly losing relevance" (a claim for which you provide no evidence), what player is "slowly gaining relevance"?

Everything that is provided by default by the OS.

Installing VLC used to be one of the first things people did on a new computer, including many non tech-savy people, along with a web browser that isn't IE/Edge.

Now the fraction who bother installing it is much smaller. The default video player is good enough for most usage (overall usage has declined anyway because of streaming).