Still, I wish someone would make a clone of the Adobe Animate program that directly exports to WASM, with all the artsy bells and whistles that I loved about it. Specifically, I would like something that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for forever. It was my first "real" experience with writing code, and I know I'm far from alone with that.
Pico8 and Game Maker and GDevelop and Scirra Construct are still fun, so it's not like there's a shortage of game making toolkits for younger people to get into this stuff. I just miss Flash in particular.
It also doesn’t help that it’s two pronged: Flash is an animation tool and a software development environment.
There are some great animation software packages out there like Toonboom or even something like Moho or Opentoonz, but as far as I am aware they do not have the same kind of direct integration with a programming language like Flash did.
On the other end of the end of the spectrum, you have tools like Game Maker which do have programming as a core feature, but you’re expected to do animations elsewhere and import them in.
So Flash is a competent tool across two complicated domains.
People, including developers, consistently underestimate work that needs to go into developing good user facing tools. And a lot of that work is not fun, not exciting, just work you have to do.
I’ll throw out one theory:
It attracted the most creative developers and not necessarily the most technical. There is a difference and both belong on a team.