I’m only familiar with Flash as a user, not as developer. I’m curious, what did Flash have, that you can’t readily do with JS and Canvas? Be as broad or specific as you like.
Now you kind of have to think in code, and architect the site as a whole, there's less creative impulse, or simply messing around to find something cool. This interactive messing around has to be visual, ideas should be easily copy-pastable, etc.
Because it was easy to experiment with the whole interactive media, and you didn't really have to worry about differences in player (no touch, no mobile, player was independent of browser), you could create wild stuff in very short amount of time, and everyone could play with it in the same way.
I loved Flash. Sure, it wasn't accessible, wasn't SEO-friendly or searchable or linkable, and had no future in mobile, but it was a magical creative canvas quite unlike anything available now.
But on the other hand a 12 year old can’t figure it out in a week and ship an animation they made from scratch to the web.
For me the canvas was powerful, I could use a wacom to draw, tween motion between frames and visualize the whole thing quickly with playhead scrubbing, and keyframe tweaking etc.
I don't miss Flash but it would be really interesting to see how it would be used in today's mature webscape.
- Click button X, run Timeline 1. - Click Button Y, run Timeline 2. - Click X again, run Timeline 1 in reverse.
That made it far more intuitive for designers, who can prototype interaction design ideas themselves, instead of leaving it entirely to developers to implement.
The death of Flash led to the death of the creative web, because anything outside of the bounds of CMS templated content required developers to do everything from CSS, JS triggers and deployment. Even today, that workflow persists, but is worse, because creative works can't be bundled into a single executable file like what was possible w/ Flash . Designers now create something in After Effects, which then has to be compiled into code via Lottie, and implemented by a developer.
Now imagine what it means today to create a simple animation, export it to Lottie, incorporate that into a website and publish that. It’s a nightmare. And it’s nowhere near to what was possible with Flash.