Comment by its_ubuntu

Nah, it's not a bug in VLC. It's a bug in whatever janky patches Ubuntu applies to the entire ecosystem, including VLC. Somehow or another they screw things up.

I had the same thought as you at first, and was so unimpressed with buggy ass VLC on Linux Mint I was going to revert to the 2.x version, when I first built my distro. It wouldn't compile however, so I was forced to go to the latest 3.x. It turned out to work fine. The problems I had on Ubuntu just vanished and it was rock solid.

Now VLC did turn out to have some actual problems in the end that shifted me to MPV permanently. But nothing like crashing the whole system. That's all Ubuntu right there.