Canvas/WebGL may replace Flash to end users. I'm not aware of creator tools that allow people to put things together as easily as they could using Flash.
Literally everything about animate.
It is hugely bloated and awful to use and crash prone. It takes upwards of 30 seconds to save a file. It has two different kinds of tween to support backwards compatibility. And the "HTML" export is a garbage fire.
Flash used a form of vector graphics that were incompatible with svgs.
Adobe has been trying to maintain backwards compatibility with flash (because most studios were still using the last version macromedia put out over 10 years ago) So adobe animate was always doomed to try and please everyone and end up pissing everyone off.
It's also nowhere near as easy to distribute these games compared to Flash. All you needed with Flash was the swf and as long as you had a flash player then it would work.
What? Everyone these days has a browser. How is it more difficult to share a web game than sharing a flash game? IF anything, back then you often had to install macromedia and other plugins since they didn't always come by default on every computer.
Discovery. Discovery. Discovery.
Sure you can host it on your personal site but who is gonna find it? It has to be on a 3rd party website and that 3rd party website wants some way to monetize it (by showing ads). It's harder to manage many files than one file that a VM can run as is.
Also Flash had something like 98-99% installation base during like 2000-2010 so it was very much not a problem. Flash had a much larger market share than any one browser.
The reason discovery is down isn't because they're hard to find, it's because there's much more interesting "entertainment" on the web these days, such as Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, and other time sinks. Back in the days, Flash games and geocities were the only forms of entertainment, which is why they were so big. Nowadays, we've got amazing free content and games everywhere, which is why this kind of entertainment isn't as sought after anymore. It's not lack of discovery, it's lack of demand.
