It was already dying. Every web dev in the world hated it, and so did most of the users. But the worst offense was having proprietary closed source binary that couldn't be audited, running untrusted code on end devices. For instance, if you're on any OS other than Mac or Windows, you'd have a bad time, and often have no option to use flash sites (at the time, it was common to build flash sites even for simple document-style web pages). It was a security nightmare, but it was also a stability nightmare. When I saw Steve Jobs announcement I was so relieved. It was a bold move at the time, iPhone was nowhere near as dominant as it is today.