Unity WebGL is definitely close to where Flash was. If anything WASM adoption is growing, it’s a respected standard. Once there is multi threading, heap expansion and streaming instanciation in iOS ... I’m going to guess 15, or 4 years from now, it’ll be the true spirit of Flash.
I’m not sure about a “dumber” design discipline though. Really it’s Windows developers being left behind, for a while now.
What we had 20 years ago was an insecurable proprietary plugin for web browsers. It wasn't standard, nobody could audit it, it was just a corporate product.
And where we are at now, where Macromedia got bought and Adobe slowly drained its lifeblood and killed its products, is what happens when you try to build systems on top of holistically proprietary foundations. Nobody owes you their enduring survival and you are totally dependent on whoever owns the platform to give you their blessing.
Its a lesson Apple developers often love waxing poetic all over the front page of HN about on the regular.
I’m not sure about a “dumber” design discipline though. Really it’s Windows developers being left behind, for a while now.