DE froze with graphic glitches... lots of kernel, drm, and amdgpu entries in journal

To be fair, VLC hardware accel, and especially its ‘automatic’ configs have been poor or broken for a long time. I wonder what results you would have with mpv or mplayer or frontends like smplayer.
(I have amdgpu+hwaccel and do not experience the same)

Example thread with linked ones: Vlc does not end process after closed - #2 by airclay

But also … if you wanted to test … 5.16 is available with the patch at least in Unstable Branch.