ActionScript was a terrible language. More complex flash projects were really a hacked together mishmash of things, none of it standard, none of it supported without plugins, and oh, have we all forgotten about the weekly zero-days that flash had?

It might have been more "creative" but that was also due to the fact that it was around at the beginning of the web, when everything was more creative. People had not figured out UI or UX patterns yet at that point, and there was massive wheel reinvention taking place all the time.

Flash was an absolute catastrophe for accessibility at well. A screen reader would just say "Flash movie" as that's all that was actually in the page.

We've had to reinvent a lot of that stuff, true, but we've also gained interoperability, security, and accessibility. I think those are all worthy trade-offs.