> The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it.

Sorry, that's simply not true. The tech was ahead of its time. The implementation was intuitive. Only developers and Steve Jobs hated it, because Flash made it way too easy for anyone to make something fun.

Also anyone who gave two shits about security hated it because it was a security nightmare. Don't leave a hater out.

And yet, there was no html5 newgrounds. The magic of flash was that it gave a space where a music person, an art person, and a programmer could bang something out. The barrier to entry was comically low, which allowed an absolute explosion of content.

Sometimes good products happen despite bad technical foundations.

> And yet, there was no html5 newgrounds.

Let me introduce you to itch.io[0] where, in fact, people bang out HTML5 games at a rate that will stagger your eyeballs.

(Even me, a resolute "backend-only" dinosaur managed to use a HTML5 game engine to knock something out playable in an hour or two.)

[0] https://itch.io/games/platform-web - ~689k results

It was definitely amazing, especially as a creator. It's how I learned to program! Actionscript was my first language. The only thing kinda close to the experience now is Processing. There may have been issues with the tech, but it kickstarted so many creative and engineering professional careers. There were so many good apps and games. It had such a rich ecosystem.