Anyone whose made an Instagram filter or TikTik effect recently - it was like that, though even easier, but allowing you to do actual coding right down to very low level stuff should you desire.
and you could get push your creation to any screen in the known universe with essentially zero testing.
Pretty sure half the internet surfers had plugins that made flash run only when user activated by the time it started to wane.
Personally I only activated it for games i wanted to play, so most of that creativity was lost on me.
I remember the time when pc fans hearable meant 95% that i opened a web page with a flash component by mistake...
Humanity has proven it can't handle anything else than static pages. Then the developers themselves have to pay for their bloat rather than the users.
Obviously flash was not designed for small screens or small batteries.
But it could have been adapted! If Adobe had been in any way competent or caring the flash runtime could have been converted to html5
But Adobe suck
It was the same even before mobile phones. Laptops had batteries too. CPU fans sounded even worse than today when pegged at 100%.
I think a Bret Victor, "Inventing on Principal" style editor would be perfect, combined with some sort of scratch like Python IDE where each element is defined in terms of its reactive behaviors with other elements on a timeline.
I didn't say easy, I said not too difficult. Order of magnitude difference. :)
https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII?t=634
With some http://lighttable.com/
A portable runtime isn't that hard. An effective and approachable authoring tool is the real challenge.