If all you want to do is play a simple unencrypted video without ads, a <video> tag is indeed all you need. As soon as you start working with adaptive streaming (DASH/HLS), need ads, need a more advanced UI or need better metrics, you'll need some sort of base video player 'framework' to deal with those things. This provides that, similar to video-js, but in a more modern way.
It's impossible to play DRM video without heavy JS (except in Safari). Netflix probably uses a similar library to Shaka for their DASH streams.
HTML5 video is only really simple if you want to just play MP4's with H264 encodings. For everything else you're going to want a wrapper to deal with compatibility checks, smoothing out cross-browser bugs, deal with ads, set up DRM, ...
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If all you want to do is play a simple unencrypted video without ads, a <video> tag is indeed all you need. As soon as you start working with adaptive streaming (DASH/HLS), need ads, need a more advanced UI or need better metrics, you'll need some sort of base video player 'framework' to deal with those things. This provides that, similar to video-js, but in a more modern way.
Is that really true? Netflix uses html5 video to stream. The use case for a pure js player must be fairly small
edit: my bad, I thought the project in the OP didn't use html5 video at all, I see how that it is a wrapper around it.
It's impossible to play DRM video without heavy JS (except in Safari). Netflix probably uses a similar library to Shaka for their DASH streams.
HTML5 video is only really simple if you want to just play MP4's with H264 encodings. For everything else you're going to want a wrapper to deal with compatibility checks, smoothing out cross-browser bugs, deal with ads, set up DRM, ...