I was going to comment on this as well. As someone who worked in AS3 heavily but left it years ago, i wonder the cause of this. My guess is not that adoption is increasing, but instead that the expertise has long since evacuated the field, leaving people who work in AS3 hard-pressed to find answers within their departments.

Adobe AIR / Flex Framework was probably also used for lots of intranet or business applications and not only browser based stuff. For these usecases AIR is still actively supported, and I guess a few companies still work on it and maintain their applications.

I also know of a few embedded systems that used Actionscript/AIR for their graphical user interface. These also have a long lifecycle and need to be maintained. Although I doubt that most of these would get any new features.

It is, so that's why people who get an urgent task to maintain something in AS3 are quite likely to need and use stackoverflow.

I would guess it's for recreational stuff like animation and games.

Not at all, after the issues with Apple, Adobe created an AOT native compiler for flash, so it is still used a lot by media folks.

Probably still good for prototyping...

there is a lot of Flash out there in the Ad and Video world