Then Flash just died without being replaced by anything
Here is the original memo: https://www.editionmultimedia.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/...
If they had been willing to invest the resources needed to make it both performant and, most importantly, secure, there's a much better chance that it would have survived—it might even have been enough for Jobs to be willing to have it work on the iPhone. (Maybe.)
Too many people lamenting how the death of Flash ended a thriving ecosystem of games and other art forms forget that Flash was also a huge resource hog, one of the #1 sources of crashes on many systems, and an absolutely massive vector for malware. I'd love to see some statistics on just how many infections were enabled by Flash, and how fast that declined once it stopped being a requirement to browse large chunks of the web.
And don't forget, either, that Flash wasn't originally an Adobe product: they took it over when they bought Macromedia, eliminating their biggest competitor and guaranteeing their monopoly. I wasn't really paying that much attention to the space, but it wouldn't surprise me if under Macromedia, it was getting better and more frequent updates.
I've been using SVG for years for various purposes (though, admittedly, mostly static graphics) and I can't complain.
Around 2010, I did experiment with things like Silverlight and SVGs. SVGs was OK, but the performance quality was not there. It might be a lot better now.