alt Hacker NewsFlash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.
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Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5.
During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it.
Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable.
The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now.
Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.
Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back.
The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible.
Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.
The security issue could have been addressed by simply running it in a sandbox.