What pioneer is/was VLC trying to copy? Media Player Classic? Windows Media Player? Before VLC, the ecosystem of video players was a mess, and if you came across a format you didn't already had installed codecs for, chances were you couldn't play that file. But VLC always could play it, no matter what file, as long as it said it was a video file.

> However, it never pushed the envelope in terms of codecs

VLC literally took over the world because you could install VLC and VLC only, and stop having to care about codecs at all, at the time at least. Maybe today it's different, because the ideas of VLC already spread, but at the time, things were different.

I personally use mpv most of the times today, but when I got started with computers and didn't understand as much as I do now, installing codecs to be able to view some video I just downloaded was a pretty confusing task. CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) for MPC helped a lot, but to even get to that point took some time.