You're arguing from a different definition under which nobody but Adobe ever had the possibility to "kill" flash. I doubt there's much disagreement that Apple's refusal of flash on iOS was the most significant factor in its demise. Without it, Adobe would to this day happily rake in the cash.

It's also a good reminder of the positive influence Apple has often had. Remember that "no flash" was the "no Esc" of its time, and that they had to go all-out to defend it (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/). 6 years later, it stands as one of the rare cases where a proprietary technology was replaced by an open standard.

I read the comment as implying that Adobe killed flash by releasing it as a steaming pile of insecure resource-hogging shit, rather than as a secure, efficient plugin.

If Flash didn't kill your battery and expose you to new security vulnerabilities every few weeks, it likely would have continued to this day.

Eventually, they pulled the lever, yes.

But Adobe touted Flash on mobile as some kind of essential technology, when it was 100% crap.

If Apple offered it on iOS, Adobe would have been milking it to this day...

Flash actually runs on iOS :

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/air_for_ios.html

So iOS do support Flash, just not its browser.