This has been true on VLC forever.
Its simply not very good at ‘automatic’, especially when it comes to hardware acceleration.
If you must use VLC, visiting the relevant settings is also a must … even more so if you have anything other than a standard intel iGPU.
(on some old chromebook the only way to get playback was using the X11 output)
Some copied images from an old thread talking about the same thing in 2021, which was repeated from the old forums thread from 2019, etc…
On the other hand … whether using mplayer, mpv, or frontend smplayer seems to work with the automatic settings just fine, though I take care to have that gpu-accelerated as well.
I honestly havent seen vlc as the media player standard for over a decade … at least not on the linux desktop.