Most sites these days are bloated, laggy and resource-hungry
Do you tend to have lots of tabs open at once, or use multiple browsers?
Let's keep it simple. It is really such a bad trade-off to occasionally click a link rather than playing an embedded video in exchange of having a site that renders and loads smoothly
Good point, worth mentioning. It's definitely worth giving it a try for a while though, and see if there actually is any major problem caused by allowing embedding. If so, then we can always ditch it later; if not, then we have another useful resource for sharing clips.
Ideally, embeds would change into links after the user has watched the video (or after a certain amount of time has passed), to save on loading resources. I'm not even sure if this is possible though.