As of right now VLC also doesn’t properly support Wayland, but MPV does. It’s a great piece of software!
Agree on the sentiment about VLC though, having an open source project demonstrate what is possible and stand the test of time definitely paves the way for future work and improvements.
Afaik the StarFive SOCs used in SBCs are a lot slower than current ARM offerings. Part of that might be because software support is worse, so maybe compilers and related tooling aren’t yet optimized for them?
Hopefully development on these continues to improve though. The biggest nail in the coffin for Pi alternatives has been software support.