Flash was a poorly written piece of software

None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.

It was not a CPU hog - this is a myth that needs to die The flash runtime was pretty modest. Now, the code people wrote was CPU hogs, because lots of non coders were writing code and they would do anything to make it work. The Flash runtime was not causing the Punch the Monkey and to peg your CPU, it was because the punch the monkey ad was fucking awful code. All those Flash programmer went on to write the first wave of HTML5 stuff which, shock horror, where vastly CPU inefficient.

The core ideas of Flash remain unparalleled even now. - Vector drawing and rendering for extremely fast performance and file size - Visual authoring tool that invited creative, non-technical people to the party - Deep support for managing state changes over time - Gradual ramp of complexity that balanced ease of entry without overly constraining expertise Were most Flash apps slow and buggy? Yes Did Flex have tons of bloat and memory leaks? Yes Did Flash create a cambrian explosion of creative and fun projects that inspired a generation of young people? Yes