I was the parenthetical latter. I see the same kind of dynamic with React Developers these days: the platform itself encourages poor coding practices and a detachment from the core technologies of HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
But on HN, I commonly see the opposite "retro manchild" take that Flash was all just all web fun & games applets, totally unlike all this awful Node/React stuff. They have no idea how professional ActionScript programmers did things.