> I know a lot of people talk about the tooling not being there, but I'm not sure that's the case. Web development is a very open field, there is a ton of documentation, and a lot of easy ways to get started. Just open developer tools in your browser and you can write Javascript - things were never the easy with flash. There's also plenty of free tools for building things with, from game libraries to animation editors, to IDEs.

But a lot of JavaScript/web tooling is basically about making "web applications out of what once was a document framework".

Flash was more of a gateway to creative interactive content than "webapps"/games imo. MS paint -> vector art -> animation with sounds -> interactive content was that really good creative path way. Action script didn't mean maintainable code. It just meant you could easily add simple actions to various events. I honestly believe that tool alone gave birth to a lot of the cultural forces you mention.

I remember cartoon network and movie studios releasing lot more interactive websites for their content in Flash.

But you're right, a lot more content gets consumed on mobile / tablets these days than desktops, and i guess people/businesses are optimizing for that.