All the examples deal with programatically-created animations, but there's definitely a market for a tool to create Homestar Runner-type animations using SVG.
edit: I suppose it was widely used for web applications or even entire websites, which is now an obviously inappropriate use case, but I've still yet to see any new web technology properly replace it for polished vector-rendered animations or games.
Flash's approach to animation, with an object stream and a timeline stream, was a good one; display could start without reading the entire stream, something the SVG/CSS/Javascript mess can't do.
Shockwave was even more advanced, with full 3D. For a year, Shockwave even had the Havok physics engine in the player, allowing full 3D games with physics, but Adobe didn't keep up the payments and it had to be removed.
In short: Not a vendor-neutral standard nor an especially good standard, bad for security, bad for performance, bad for battery life, bad for touch, and promoting a lowest-common-denominator experience.
I’m not sure I agree with all those reasons, but the killing blow for Flash was that all those iOS and Android devices don’t run it.
Flash became a pseudo web-standard, and a closed one so. This meant Flash-support could only be implemented on devices and platforms Adobe decided to support.
And Adobe's history when it comes to fixing bugs, problems and providing adequate support for anything but their #1 platform (Windows) was appalling.
When Apple launched the iPhone, they decided that they didn't want their platform dependant on other's people code and limited to whatever effort Adobe would bother to put in.
At the time it was a ballsy move, as flash was surely king. In retrospect, I think it worked out (mostly) fine and I'm glad they were willing to foot the risk.
I say "mostly", because with Flash going away, people have been asking for the open HTML-standard to include closed elements which they earlier would typically do in Flash: DRM and friends.
The result is that the open HTML standard is no longer open and that open-source software can no longer fully implement a standards-comliant web-browser, meaning you can only get "working" browsers from the big guys like Apple, Google and Microsoft.
That's a terrible loss for the web and for the future.
So Apple only had the choice between no Flash and a really bad version. Flash ran really slow on OSX compared to Windows, so it was unrealistic to expect Adobe to suddenly provide a good implementation of Flash for the iPhone. Adobe painted them into the corner by not properly supporting small platforms.
What that shows is creating three different SVGs in sketch and then animating them using the Snap.svg JS library to animate them.
disclaimer: I work there