Watching videos feels a lot more comfortable to me than reading text. If I have the time I would always prefer it to reading. As such I think it’s quite over the top of you to use words like “preposterous” and “sad”.
There are downsides to it, sure, you described them quite well. It would certainly be best to have both but detesting videos on principle seems a bit preposterous and sad to me.
Well, you have more time and patience than I do and that's fair enough. Video is wonderful so the notion that I 'detest it on principle' is silly. As I said, I can't paste from a video, no search engine can do anything useful with a video, there's no way for me to skip you earnestly telling me things I don't care about in a video. Using video for something that could just as well be conveyed in text and images is a sort of worst of both worlds. More than that, it actually breaks the web. Without linking, excerpting, indexing, there is no web. So I still think the Main Designer Kahuna of Firefox (a web browser) demanding 7 undivided, full-screen minutes of my attention is preposterous and sad, for anything short of 7 minutes of intricate interpretive dance or other information otherwise unsuitable for text and images.
There are downsides to it, sure, you described them quite well. It would certainly be best to have both but detesting videos on principle seems a bit preposterous and sad to me.