Yeah, it’s amazing how upvoted the previous comment is. Just a bunch of idiots jumping on the web-hate bandwagon when even basic media players like Kodi have a tough time playing back video on the Pi.
It just isn’t a very optimized device for video playback. The Pi 5 is actually a step backwards as well, providing only H265 hardware video decode which the web doesn’t even use.
The failure to wait for network-online was the last thing preventing me from going rootless. I am going to have to try this again.