Why do you think the author of this piece, to who you originally replied, has any control over this?

I'm not talking about pausing the video after it starts playing. I'm talking about a global setting to prevent videos from playing before you manually unpause them. Safari has such a setting, for instance.

Exactly what “I have to go out of my way to override” covers, from my comment.

If you don't configure your software when you first start using it, I don't know what to tell you. This shouldn't be "out of your way". You should have set this when you first started using your browser. If you didn't for whatever reason, don't be surprised when autoplaying videos exist.

Dunno man, NOBODY likes auto playing videos, yet creators keep using them for reasons unknown. This is starting to sound a lot like victim blaming. Auto playing videos should not exist, period. End of story.

I don't like them either...