Yes, I was aware you meant streaming vs downloading. In some videos, I can see the benefits of a dedicated media player, but most of the time, a simple play/pause and the occasional playback speed (usually with lecture style videos, because they usually speak too slowly and I want to speed it up) is all I need, and the most of the HTML5 players accomplish this easily.

For me, if it is a longer video, I tend to download it instead of streaming it for two reasons. The first is I tend to be a digital packrack, so if it is a documentary, I may download it and add it to my media archive for playback on the htpc. The second is because I'm too lazy to build mpv on my system. mplayer has served me great for well over a decade. It is what first really introduced me to complex depedencies and how to get everything in order to build that program. That being said, I do have mpv queued up for my 14.2 system once I finish migrating all my confs and programs to it (it's all installed on a nice new NVMe drive, and once I'm ready, I'll reboot into it to minimize downtime for my web-facing services).

But I do agree that people should use what makes them happy. Slackware is great about providing users that ability