The VideoLAN Forums

I think it would be a good idea to completely disable any button
that selects whether opened items are automatically added to the playlist,
because that should be an unavoidable hardwired behaviour
on account of the many advantages it brings to all users,
first of all going back to playing a previously played stream
whenever the last opened stream is broken or has a delay in starting,
which is of course preferable to VLC wating for a the stream to start.

Playing something, anything, no matter whether it's intended or not by the user,
is always better than revealing that that the desired stream is broken or slow starting.

Users who insist that a player should asininely wait
for the actual, desired, last-opened stream to start playing,
and only display an error after a settable timeout,
instead of bouncing back to playing a perfectly working, prevously opened stream,
should be clearly told switch to a different player, line e.g. Celluloid on MPV,
which exhibits such strange and suboptimal behaviour.

You're free to modify VLC to not implement what you don't want.