New Stream Webpart - Disappointing

I think you summarized this well for most people who have been waiting for the Stream web part replacement to work with videos stored in SharePoint. In case you didn't realize it, there is the ability to create a Playlist for videos. Personally, I would never have built it the way it was done, but it is what we have. You have to add a List and Playlist is a template. Or, if you go to the Stream homepage creating a Playlist there is an option. It has had some updates and the display is nice and finally you can select it as a list to display on a page using the List web part. However, I don't like that it is literally a Microsoft List and you are pulling in references to where the videos live. It would've been better to create a new view on a library or build something off the Highlighted Content web part as you have noted in your post. But. . . at least with the Playlist you can use metadata properties and pull in videos across multiple sites. I think the File and Media web part and the Highlighted Content web part - especially as the inline formats roll out - are going to be the way to go for the near (and maybe distant) future. I did note that Tasmania has a point about the web part displaying the site for videos. It would definitely be great if the file type selected didn't display that - or better yet if you could just decide if you want it to show for any file type. I can think of use cases to hide it for documents also.