Up until just last month I had never had a problem with VLC. But I don't pirate content so maybe I just hadn't encountered the problematic files. However, recording voice notes in Opus format on my phone, it turns out that VLC has a bug playing Opus files at certain bit rates. However for me this is easily worked around by just using MPV.

I dropped VLC circa 2019 for all the reasons mentioned and ever since I use exclusively MPV, both on Windows and Linux.

So at least from those times

The only current VLC issue I encounter regularly is the subtitles one. I'm a lite video user, so I'm not sure the technical details, but some subtitle formats render black-on-black in VLC, but work fine on Plex/TV.

I've also encountered the odd "this video is corrupted" error that persists even after re-encoding. But I've never thought to troubleshoot to see if it's a VLC, and instead just get a different version.