mpv has better support for playing videos from the web. You can paste a youtube link into vlc's "Open Network Stream..." dialogue, but because VLC doesn't use yt-dlp for this it often doesn't work at all (it presently doesn't work for me) and works with fewer websites than mpv.

Also mpv's json IPC interface is easier to use with better documentation than any of VLC's numerous remote control protocols (which aren't mentioned in the manpage, and have incomplete hand-wavy documentation spread across numerous poorly organized wiki pages.)