Eh, I'd still complain about them; they tended to be terribly poorly written and do a lot of unnecessary work, slowing things down and using too much power. Of course, so do random javascript things.
I kind of miss the days of the HTML/HTTP-only web.
To which the answer should be, "no, but Canvas might have, and here's why it didn't".
Actually, that would be an interesting article to me, because in retrospective, I'm surprised we haven't seen more Flash-like Canvas-based sites. My suspicion is that Canvas's interactivity story isn't yet strong enough: you kind of have to roll-your-own interactivity, pending technologies such as addHitRegion() et al. [1]; most notably there's no support whatsoever for text-based interaction (e.g. text widgets). Hence why most web apps which would have been Flash a decade ago still stick to HTML instead of Canvas.
I kind of miss the days of the HTML/HTTP-only web.