To this day I've never found any drawing/animation tool I'm comfortable with, which means I rarely draw anymore which means my drawing skills are getting worse which means I draw even less.

I'm not sure how much of that is just the realities of getting older vs the actual change in tooling, but it's definitely fuel for some nostalgia.

It wasn't the technology, it was the economy. In the late 90's consumer internet uptake was growing literally exponentially, but the population of hackers who could provide content was lagging terribly.

I mean, obviously Flash was probably the best option for that particular niche, but if it didn't exist something else would have happened.

Because it's not the technology, it's the economy! You can't build another Flash, because no such product could exist. We're awash with talented content generation for the connected modern society. There's no niche for hacker students to fill, with any tool.

There were many "portal" sites that showed (hosted) many games and showed ads alongside or before the games started, and then a second sub-ecosystem of ads embedded in the games themselves by the game developers.

Instead of feeling like their games were "pirated" when somebody copied the game's .swf file, developers had this (viral) mechanism which made those games lucrative wherever they'd appear on the web!

Source: know someone who ran one of those "portal" sites and made an absolute killing.

Made good money for a few years and bought my first car off it!

The hate against flash is warranted in the contexts the hate originates, but there is a niche where it belongs.