Well.
Installed Cinnamon. I have picture thumbnails in Nemo, but no video thumbnails. Yes, everything in preferences is set correctly. Yes, I have ffmpegthumbnailer
installed.
Ah. Duh. Just up it to 32Gb and it started generating thumbnails. Not sure why the people designing this DE thought “Hey, only videos under 1Mb in size should have thumbnails…!”