Yes, Jobs and Apple are kind of sharks but on the other hand did you witness Flash running on Android phones? They were so slow that you didn't want to enable it even if you could :D
Javascript was also slow back then, Chrome/V8 were only launched in 2008 and reached phones only years later, yet JavaScript based websites were used on smartphones.
I'd be curious to see a comparison of site performance now, Flash vs a bog-standard HTML + JS + animations site. I think they would be quite similar.
Also computing power increases with time, so this is a silly reason to kill off a feature.