"You Can't Go Home Again" is such a concise and powerful way to remind ourselves that no place or event or thing or experience ever remains exactly the way you remember it, especially as you grow into adulthood. It often feels like a conservative mind is one that is in deep denial about this simple yet unyielding truth. If only more people accepted change in their world as a thing that happens naturally, rather than something to fight against. Maybe we could make genuine progress as a society?
I don't mean to get political but
Flash wasn't "dying" fast enough, so they buried it alive.
And they didn't bother to replace the vector rendering/animation that is both aesthetically and functionally great (low data use). Also what was replaced did so without the ease of archiving that Flash allowed. It has a similar feel as looking into the past to see something good that is now lost/forgotten.
I can't say I'm well versed in the specific history of Flash, it sounds fascinating. But even though I look back at Flash fondly, I can't say I miss the near constant stream of malware that disguised itself as Flash.
Never once experienced that, likely because ad-blocking and more recently not being on the primarily targeted OS.
Though vector video could've been something supported by HTML5 spec and even Youtube, including enhanced features like dynamic aspect ratio support (and surely more).
Similarly, WebGL would get more points with me if it had a container format to allow downloading and playing as easily as .SWF files. When WebGL is inevitably replaced, the archival effort likely is not going to look nearly as good as what we've seen with Flash.