Flash is a comedically shit technology. There's a couple animation capabilities it had that were nice & simple & people adore it endlessly for that. But Flash hated users, gave them nothing, no power (alike a native app) & was a big proprietary anti-hypermedia ball of jank, and it had the most trashfire craptastic lack of accessibility one could ever imagine.

This desire to keep hypermedia down, to create hard walls between different purposes of apps... it feels poisonous & misguided. There is too much of the web today thay does abuse client side code too much. But frankly it rarely affects most people, there's still viable techniques for manipulating it (except for Flutter's CanvasKit which is an abomination more cursed than Flash), and honestly, we're still getting better at webdev, still learning, still emerging better libraries & best practices, & generally the urge to do better is here & slowly happening.

There's some really dark takes that we have to save the web from apps. That we should bring back Flash is one of the most unforutnate least justified most tragic hot takes I've heard though.

That was the stuff, animations, games, apps, all so intuitive.

Flash was great for developers, but terrible for users. The only good user experience was "flash games/animations" and even then they weren't responsive and a little clunky.

The Flash I remember was bloated "Flash" websites that had No HTML, No url paths, No SEO metadata, Terrible for accessibility.... but it was easy to develop for I guess...