Qualitatively speaking what was the development experience like for Flash websites or animations vs. HTML 5 + react OR JS?
Can you say definitively one experience was better than the other or is it a more complicated story?
I know there's a lot of hate for flash but I'm specifically asking about the developer experience here.
In summary: Horses for courses.
As a language I really enjoyed AS3; solid class system, strongly typed, good refactoring tools and crucially a decent and standard library.
I may be old or disconnected, but it seems like the like of the flash animator community won't be seen again. Where will we find another Homestar Runner or Weebl?
It was the right tool at just the right time. It was well able to deliver animations and interactive multimedia with the one tool and ecosystem. While the JS/HTML5 tools can manage animations and multimedia, it seems like the environment, libraries and tools are much more spread out... which perhaps discourages animators, while developers are used to working in such a way.