I had the same problem, though it mostly stopped in recent years. A few days ago, though, I had a nightmare about being in college, which hasn't happened in years. Back in the day it happened constantly, though. A common one was having a nightmare about having a test that day. Tons of stressful dreams. I think school fucks people up and is legitimately traumatic. Then again, so is society in general.
Bizarre. I never had any problems with mpv (the closest being the lack of UI, initially, but it has just enough, and everything else can be dealt with in the configuration file, or with a lua script if you need to go that far to get what you want). VLC, on the other hand, holy fucking shit. I remember trying it when I still used Windows, and then going back to Media Player Classic. It's a lot heavier, the screen kept getting all gray and fucked up. Not sure if I even used it on Linux. I think I used mplayer initially, and then mpv, and mpv is basically the successor to mplayer. Maybe try mplayer. It's not updated anymore, I think, but it should work. Maybe an older version of mpv would work as well, though you can't use that on updooter distributions, so you would have to use Guix or Nix or Gobo or Carbs or maybe Gentoo, or whatever else allows you to use more than one version of a program. I guess even an appimage could do the job, maybe try that.
This is really damn good. The RSS support is fantastic as well, and I use Elfeed for that, and that's in Emacs, so it's good to have the option to use eww. I also have elfeed-tube and elfeed-tube-mpv. All that can mostly replace video websites. I even have thumbnails in some of them (doesn't work for Invidious for some reason). It only doesn't replace comments, but I don't comment on most things that I watch anyway.
Big improvement over Pleroma, going to save me quite a bit of both pain and RAM. I really need to work on my setup more, and set up i2p, and also a Whonix VM for when I want Tor. And get more into Nyxt so I can move a step closer towards basically turning my system into a bootleg Lisp machine. Maybe I should try GuixSD as well. Too many things to do.
Other than the speed, there's not a single thing that didn't get worse, and even the speed got slower after the JavaScript infestation. Remember when websites opened instantly? Yeah, I liked second half of the 2000s too. https://social.076.moe/url/7123
I'm not all that convinced that those posts were even written by a human. If it's not a bot, it's a paid shill. Remember how the WEF/UN was going to hire people to shill their agenda online? There's one, if he's a human at all. https://social.076.moe/url/7120
Just found out about it. This is what every website should be like. It works, it's fast, and I can probably use it even in Links or the the Emacs browser.