Out of pure curiosity, what kind of things were you VLC using for, for it to break so often? I'm almost never doing anything with video, so I'm completely clueless in this field.

I don't recall my issues being media file or workload specific [0]. It was specifically just general frontend stuff I believe [1]. Although I should probably also mention that I don't remember much to begin with, other than my decidedly negative conclusion that made me switch players, and the overall personal narrative around that. It's been quite a few years if not a whole decade.

[0] Doesn't mean there weren't any, but then I was not doing anything special. Just watched anime, listened to music, streamed YouTube. Hardly an extraordinary workload for VLC, or indeed any media player in general.

[1] I remember them changing around the volume slider widget back and forth ad nauseam for example, and that becoming in some particular way defective that I cannot recall.