It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found.
The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.
And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.