mpv does everything it should in good and performant, while VLC comes with batteries (and codecs) included. This (batteries) can be a good thing because “it just works tm” or it can be a headache with weird errors and security. Personally, i switched to mpc-hc after VLC always had blocky artifacts, and later on to Linux and mpv. Only bad thing about mpv is that it has race conditions with config vs. cli, imo.