As HTML5 was emerging someone posted a HTML 5 demo on hacker news. It put 1 core of my machine to 80%. I wrote an equivalent version in Flash and it used 5%.
All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.
At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better.
But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name - Adobe Air? I think they still had some market power they could have wielded.
In late 2000s they owned the Web App space ( what was called Rich Internet Applications in their speak). Flex (their business GUI components library and markup language) was absolutely dominating corporate Web app development.
And they just abandoned it.
In an alternative reality we are all building HTML5 Web apps with Flex Builder right now.
The Flash Player is, at the end of the day, a proprietary Canvas widget with a ECMAScript based VM powering it. With HTML5 they could have targetted the actual real HTML5 Canvas and completely eliminated the flash player plug in whilst still retaining the tools.
And then some genius decided "What if we ran JavaScript on the server?" and Node was born.
Then came the node_modules black hole and the left-pad debacle.
Sometimes I think JavaScript was a mistake.