Comment by pjmlp

Outside the HN bubble, in the designers and game development community, Flash was loved.

* Powerful graphical tooling, where HTML/CSS are still catching up to

* Guarantee to actually have hardware acceleration, instead of CSS z-index tricks hoping for the best

* It was the first to support game engines on the Web, like Unreal

Unknown to many, Flash apps actually do exist on mobile, because Flash also AOT compiles to native code.