In 2009 I was at Chewing com in Paris, building campaign sites in Flash. One was a contest site for Schweppes, 'Do you Schweppes?', where I did the concept and the art direction and worked on the ActionScript 2. Another was a brand site for Pampryl, the juice maker. Both sit in my Works archive today as five or six images each, about a thousand pixels wide. That's everything I can show of them. Adobe ended Flash Player at the end of 2020 and the browsers removed it.
01 What a screenshot leaves out
Those sites were mostly movement. Flash work was built on a timeline, and the job was deciding what happened between one state and the next. A still frame of that is a poster for a film. The layout survives and the typography survives. The motion, which was the reason to use Flash in the first place, doesn't.
I started working in Flash in 2002 and it stayed in my job title until 2009. That's seven years of output tied to one company's plugin. Nobody building in it then was being careless; it was the only way to get that kind of motion into a browser. But the shelf life was set by Adobe, and by Apple's decision to keep Flash off the iPhone, and neither of them asked the people who made the work.
02 What I build on now
This site does the things I used to need Flash for: a bear made of dots that scatters under the pointer, a cursor that changes shape, text that scrambles. Its dependency list is Next.js, React and one icon set. The bear is a fragment shader written against WebGL, and the rest is CSS and requestAnimationFrame. GSAP and Three.js are on my skills list and neither is installed here.
A standard can be deprecated too, and frameworks age faster than plugins ever did. What differs is how much breaks at once. If Next.js went away tomorrow I'd have a routing problem, and the shader would still compile. When Flash went, the work went with it. I'd rather maintain a few hundred lines of my own than lean on a runtime I can't keep alive.