The original article (https://www.lowpass.cc/p/vlc-five-billion-downloads-vision-pro-app) states

The app surpassed three billion downloads in early 2019

so there has been at least 2 billion downloads in the last 5 years. Also,

The latest version of VLC, which was released in November, has already been downloaded more than 335 million times by desktop users alone.

Yes I'm happy to pay money to Google when they make a reasonably priced phone with decent hardware and don't restrict the ability to install a custom OS.