Lest we only remember the roses smelling side, Macromedia also made the pile of crap called Flash.
And Both Fireworks and Dreamweaver had their fair share of bugs under Macromedia too.
And aside from animations, it helped build the "landing page" nightmare - huge (for the download speeds of the time) pages, loading tons of assets, to do nothing.
Or the even worse "flash-only website" which just showed some text and images, and had nightmarish navigation, slow download times, didn't use regular html widgets, and you couldn't copy and paste or take a bookmark of your position in it...
Thank goodness interactive experiences now require a full developer team, myriad NPM packages, and an application deployment pipeline. All for a web page that won't even work in a few years' time when some script necessary for the page to work ends up getting removed from whatever template they're using.
Interactive experiences the kind Flash was used for, can now be done trivially without plugins AND be compatible with the rest of the page (e.g. history, copy paste, etc.). For some basic stuff Flash was used you can even do them in one line of CSS. You can even play video, sound, and trigger MIDI natively now, with just a few lines.
More advanced stuff, you can it do with just canvas and at most a wrapper lib for higher level methods - no "NPM packages" or anything else required.
For casual games or animation, there are tons of FOSS and even proprietary libs, with game-building templates and GUIs to do what Flash did, and even things Flash barely did, like 3D - and they all export to native web code running on all platforms - even mobile. And with lower resources that Flash did.
So, yeah, the crap Flash.
Building something in Flash visually felt far more concrete and rewarding vs having to write lines of code for CSS keyframes or SVG animations.
Flash also just made it possible for non-programmers to build cool stuff. Today, that is pretty much impossible if you're not a programmer.
Programmers often aren't artists, so when they're playing around, they build something that may only be of interest to them. Taking HN as an example, I have seen tons of posts about people excitedly describing their favourite static site generator. Not much there for others to really dig into and enjoy.
And that's what we lose when the tools of creation are limited to those whose interests lie entirely elsewhere.
[0] https://quorten.github.io/quorten-blog1/blog/2019/05/18/sili...
