Speak for yourself buddy, I had a blast both browsing and developing for the Flash era of the web back in those days and I was barely into highschool. Macromedia tooling made web dev so approachable to kids and youngsters, for games, animations.

I get you hate Flash and MS, but the web was still way more of a wild west back then than today. Nobody from the government or ISP was monitoring my online activity to check for IP infringement or CSAM, there was no ID age verification, Youtube and other websites allowed uploads of anything, there were no manufacturer closed walled gardens preventing me what I can install on my own hardware, you weren't getting your gaming account banned for saying a $GAMER_WORD in a death match, less AD-tracking everywhere, etc. etc.

Now there's more open standards for web-dev on paper, but instead of Flash and IE, we have the monopoly walled garden of Google, Apple, Meta, etc. over the web, plus the governmental eye of Sauron over our activity and identity, which is way more cancerous than what we had >20 years ago.

People thinking we're overall better off now than in the Flash era must be on some really good weed. If using Flash was the only downside, I'd gladly go back to the web of the early 2000s. Frost my tips and plug me into the Matrix.