It's not the video and audio aspects of flash he is concerned about, it's the automatic loading and playing of content with flash that is annoying. Audio and video that doesn't load until you ask for it is perfectly acceptable.
The auto play isn't a requirement for using flash. What makes you think that the people doing auto loading and playing with flash won't do it with HTML5 tags? People can write annoying crap on any platform.
Is it? I block flash because on OS X Flash’s performance is ridiculous. I don’t care so much about auto play (the sites I visit are normally polite).
FlashBlock handles that nicely in FF. Nothing is loaded until you click on it.