The VideoLAN Forums

Stop the video before you close VLC.

Does not work most of the time

Well, the experience is already ruined,so performance impact does not make it much worse.

I think I might found the workaround. In VLC settings, go to Video and change Output from Automatic to X11 (XCB). No more hanging since then

Nope, it's not scaling but Xorg. With Wayland obviously closes properly.

I think it has something to do with desktop scaling. If I set scaling to 125% VLC hangs after quit. When I put it back to 100% it closes normaly. It happens in both KDE Plasma and Gnome on Ubuntu.