I feel like the same is true of Visual Basic 6. (Excuse me, I'll wait....)
OK, now that we've all calmed back down, VB6 has been unmatched in the way that it allowed someone with zero experience to drag-and-drop and write in what looks like pseudocode to get some little business widget built. Yes, you can engineer something with better architecture that's less likely to paint you into a `DoEvents()` corner. Yes, the mere existence of settings like `On Error Resume Next`, `Option Strict Off`, and `Option Explicit Off` are anathema to correctness, security (lol), and robustness. No, if you expect support for Unicode or 64-bit operations, it wasn't built for that.
Many people loathe Flash for its security vulnerabilities, or VB6 because of experiences with poorly-written code at businesses that should have had a 'real programmer.' And today, a tool that made the same design decisions that Flash and VB6 did - pandering to novices who weren't willing to go to the effort to do things right - would be derided as a toy, as unusable for real work outside of sandboxed demos. But both were instrumental as stepping stones in the early 2000s to transform non-computer-literate individuals and businesses into creators and users.
The vulnerabilities in Flash were not in the SWF format or the AS APIs or their intended behavior. That was all rock-solid. They were in one particular proprietary implementation of Flash player. Ruffle won't have any memory-related vulnerabilities to begin with by virtue of being written in a memory-safe language.
My first job was writing VBA programs on top of extremely complicated Excel 97 spreadsheets to prevent input errors and provide a cleaner UI. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve ever been as productive as I was at that job. It was just so straightforward to crank out decent looking forms and so intuitive for a fresh new dev
Unity is a really good alternative. Flash kinda went sideways and started really trying to lean into the Java crowd with flex. Unity is more like what would have happened if Flash heavily leaned into what it did well.
Unity is a bad alternative because it requires programming. It's also much more complex since it's a game engine, not a scriptable vector animation thing.
With Flash, you could just follow some tutorials and make something nice in no time, fully understanding what you're doing.
Flash didn't "lean into" Flex. Flex was an Eclipse-based IDE and a set of libraries that some people used for some projects. It was specifically aimed at building apps. There were layouts, controls and all that. There was a list view with cell reuse, in 2008! It was much more like Android layout system then what the web had and still has. Flex was a tool that's very good for some jobs and completely unfit for others — like any other tool, really.
