alt Hacker NewsVHS to me was the best in usability, put the tape into the VCR and it turned the VCR on and start playing, also (this is true for European TVs connected with the SCART connector) it would switch the TV to the correct input (and in some TVs even switch on the TV itself) because SCART used a +12V signal in addiction to the video to control automatic video switching (something I miss these days in HDMI, yes there is CEC but I was never able to make it work like the old SCART, and it's quite frankly a mess). And when you finished you turned off your VCR and it started playing TV again.
And controls were basic, play, stop, forward and back, nothing else. You could operate it with 4 buttons on the player without the need for a remote. It was as simple as operating a audio cassette player. Something that was easy to understand even for my grandparents, that after VHS gave up recording and playing stuff because DVDs, BluRay, etc were too complex for them to use (understand about menu and stuff they were not used to, instead of just putting the tape into the VCR and start watching).
VHS has annoyances too. No scene selection and no chapters meant you were almost always forced to FF through trailers and ads to get the show to start and you could overshoot and have to rewind again to get to where you wanted. Pause and frame forward didn't quite work right, and stopping a movie once the credits started to roll meant that the next time you wanted to watch the move you had to sit there for 10 minutes while you rewound the entire length of the film. That annoyance was only made slightly better if you bought an entire separate device for rewinding tapes at faster speeds (at the risk of breaking them as they got older)