Nah, now you are re-writing history. Flash apps could be very lean and mean or they could be resource hogs - depending on the amount of bling one put in. They could be used to develop sophisticated, lean apps using a very productive toolchain. They were an extraordinary danger to the Apple apps paradigm. And they thus needed to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

And the fact was that Steve Jobs had a history and long habit of forcing walled gardens on consumers - something well known in that era.

In fact I would call it the "widely established" fact https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627117/iphone-developers-...

Of-course most of this depends on whether you had personal experience developing productive flash apps and whether one suffers from the Apple propaganda effect - where Apple's position is King and all other positions are null and void. I happen to see the latter quite often on HN.