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It's used by most users, that's what they are saying, it doesn't matter that the file format is obscure.

If you make a video player based on ffmpeg you take input videos. The attacker can share a specially crafted video with the victim. Same kind of attack as sharing word documents.

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when it comes to security popularity doesn't matter all that much. If something is not used and insecure then the decision should be to drop the feature, not to ignore the security issue.

If Big Deployment is using a stock ffmpeg build rather than one that actually enables only the things they actually use, I feel like that's on Big Deployment.

But the point of ffmpeg is that it can consume pretty much any format. If you let end users upload videos, that is exactly what you need, it’s not desirable to have a very restrictive list of formats you will accept.

Not having massive exposed and untested surface area is very much desireable. Every platform has a highly restrictive list of formats and containers for this exact reason.

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