"Everyone"? I loved it. Kids loved it. The people who hated and killed it were programmers, and to this day they haven't created any alternative that kids would love as much.
It's similar to the murder of Dreamweaver. Actual designers who draw pixels on the screen loved it. Programmers hated it, pushed CSS instead, and visual editing of the web died.
Nowadays the technology has gone to other places and more than ever artists are locked out of the workflow and reliant on programmers to implement even the most trivial of things.
> And yes, it is a spoof, obviously. That is obvious from its content alone, and it follows a long tradition of similar spoofs. However, enough people must have fallen for it, because Bjarne Stroustrup has felt the need to publish a rather irritated disclaimer in his FAQ!
Who said anything about "good" programmers?
> The bugfilled world of IT is complicated enough as it is and always was like this.
That doesn't mean we can't make it more complicated.
Look, we got record numbers of people graduating with CS degrees, coming out of bootcamps, or just learning the trade straight off of Youtube.
We have to find extra work for these people, otherwise our salaries are going to tank because of increased competition.
As an aside, Flash is also extraordinarily inefficient and a plague security-wise, and always has been. Steve Jobs pointed this out a decade ago, of course.
Meanwhile, HTML continues to have none of those problems.
It was quite a pleasant and consistent experience compared to writing browser JS at the time(10+ years ago).
Adobe Animate can now export animations and scripts to HTML5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate
Their templates are quite flexible, and there's a lot of them, but it's not quite creating something original.