OK, now that we've all calmed back down, VB6 has been unmatched in the way that it allowed someone with zero experience to drag-and-drop and write in what looks like pseudocode to get some little business widget built. Yes, you can engineer something with better architecture that's less likely to paint you into a `DoEvents()` corner. Yes, the mere existence of settings like `On Error Resume Next`, `Option Strict Off`, and `Option Explicit Off` are anathema to correctness, security (lol), and robustness. No, if you expect support for Unicode or 64-bit operations, it wasn't built for that.
Many people loathe Flash for its security vulnerabilities, or VB6 because of experiences with poorly-written code at businesses that should have had a 'real programmer.' And today, a tool that made the same design decisions that Flash and VB6 did - pandering to novices who weren't willing to go to the effort to do things right - would be derided as a toy, as unusable for real work outside of sandboxed demos. But both were instrumental as stepping stones in the early 2000s to transform non-computer-literate individuals and businesses into creators and users.
With Flash, you could just follow some tutorials and make something nice in no time, fully understanding what you're doing.
Flash didn't "lean into" Flex. Flex was an Eclipse-based IDE and a set of libraries that some people used for some projects. It was specifically aimed at building apps. There were layouts, controls and all that. There was a list view with cell reuse, in 2008! It was much more like Android layout system then what the web had and still has. Flex was a tool that's very good for some jobs and completely unfit for others — like any other tool, really.