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