Literally the first sentence

> Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos.

Seriously, you quoted pretty much the only sentence in the whole article that's about plain playback, and even in that bullet point, the following sentence mentions hardcoding subtitles.

Literally don't stop at the first sentence!!!

> It turns out that reading the (f.) manual actually helps a lot!

The non-recommendation of VLC vs mpc/mpv is literally for playback as I quoted! MPC also doesn't do any encoding, yet it's recommended

> the following sentence mentions hardcoding subtitles.

And that sentence starts with "Apart from simply watching the video" to tell you the same thing the previous sentence told you - that comparison where VLC was not receommended was about playback, not editing