So I don't see much reason for Netflix have a deprecation cycle for undocumented functionality that a third party extension relies on. If you want to rely on internals, don't be surprised when they change.
This is the issue I have with this change, I'm following all the rules here and those rules apply to every video provider on the web for rendering video.
While I don't think it was purposeful, it certainly needs to be called out that crashing the entire page is certainly nonstandard behavior for a <video> element.
I just dealt with cross-browser issues in how setting currentTime on <audio> is handled because I needed a player to resume from a preset time.
On WebKit browsers, including desktop safari and all iOS browsers, you must wait for the ‘dataloadded’ or ‘canplay’ events to fire before trying to set currentTime.
On desktop Firefox / Chrome, you must set currentTime immediately prior to .play() or it won’t pick it up.
This is part of why Windows doesn't update the old Control Panel screens - the UI is the API for automation like this, and backwards compatibility matters more than consistency.
The new UIs won't allow you to keep open the Bluetooth config panel at the same time as the Windows Update config panel, for instance, as they share the One True Config Window. You can only view one at a time. A little ironic for an operating system named for its ability to run multiple UIs at once.
Fortunately many of the old config UIs are still there on Windows 10, especially for more advanced points of configuration.
I imagine the old UIs are also more resource-efficient, for what that's worth, following the usual trend with UI toolkits.
It's like everything has to be touch friendly. Understood that this is great in some cases. But on my desktop PC it's not. I didn't buy a big screen to have half of it filled with empty space.
For automation, this is likely because you company did not provide proper official API do to proper automation. Many companies do not, nexflix does not. So people have to hack around internals to make the things do what they want.
I am still at a loose why companies, and devs are such control freaks they only want people to use their software / hardware in the exact way they want them do, offering no other control options, automation API;s or any other "power" features". It is their way or the highway... and screw you if you do not like it
The GSuite (or whatever they call it these days) google groups UI is hot garbage. However, I finally figured out how to open a group -- effectively a mailing list -- to the public internet. This was carefully documented in our internal wiki because, again, UI is hot garbage.
Google has too many PMs, so someone decided to go screw with the UI. It is now not much easier, but it is different, so I had to spend another hour figuring out how to do the same thing. For your "convenience" as a customer, the change has invalidated the vast majority of help text on the internet helping users work around the deficiencies in Google's UI.
And that is why users hate change: the previous UI might not have been good, but we'd already figured out how to use it. So a change creates work with zero benefit to us.