Another clickbaity title not giving the whole story... "Huawei killing apps; devs blamed" would have been better. If a phone was crashing your apps and users blamed you (and rated your app as such), what would you do?
I trust the VLC team so I gave them the benefit of the doubt before even clicking, I completely agree. The title should reflect that this is in response to Huawei firmware changes.
I think the only other reasonable thing that could be done is automatically responding to the one star reviews. Maybe work with Google to remove the reviews, but these things take time and may not work. I have a hard time finding a problem with what the devs have done here.
Also, I believe developers on the Play Store can set flags for device compatibility anyway, no? Or is that limited to specs and OS version? It makes sense that if an application is known to not work properly on a given device, it might throw the "not compatible with your device" message on the app listing.
The fact that they still offer it as a direct download shows that they aren't solely trying to stop people from using it, but rather they know of the issues and don't want to claim full compatibility.
