The opposite is the case, actually. It's far easier than ever to make animations and write software.
I would contend Flash was a miserable developer tool, a near feature-free IDE, and rather than "balance", it took a kitchen sink approach to letting you put any kind of code anywhere...in an object, on the document, in a UI event of a button, on a frame.
Meanwhile, there are quite a few flash-likes for HTML5, and many of them are smart enough not to use Canvas (much)!
What you describe as miserable was my introduction to software development. I never had any technically minded friends or family, and growing up I looked at programming the same way I looked at professional sports; out of my reach and not worth attempting. I started my career as a graphic designer and flash became popular a few years after I started working. The ability to "put code anywhere" allowed me to experiment without having to learn an entire language or ecosystem just to get started. The fact that the IDE was all you need to design, script, and publish content made "hello world" as easy as installing a single app. When I consider the landscape of programming tools in 2019 I can't imagine that kid from a poor family with no training or support being able to make the transition from novice to professional. It's true that browser dev tools and online tutorials have drastically lowered to barrier of entry for application development, but the leap from browser dev tools to being able to actually author and deploy a fully functioning app is enormous. In the flash days there was no difference between the hello world and the professional development environment. It's sad, because becoming a software developer completely transformed my life and provided me with an income over 4x greater than my parents' combined salaries when I was a teenager. When I read comments deriding the old flash IDE for its simplicity it makes me sad for today's generation of underprivileged kids. I hope there is still a path for them to lift themselves out of a life of few opportunities through the joy of programming.
Yes! My entry point as well, back in the Macromedia days, making interactive animations with gotoAndStop. When AS3 appeared many years later weaned myself into the concepts of OOP, partly out of need, partly out of curiousity ... but mainly to understand other's work. Looking up to guys like mr doob. Frontend tooling today is insane. The flash ide and actionscript felt like a standard at the time, with a huge amount of power abstracted away. I feel like it's only in the past 5 years that the real standards have caught up with the (admiteddly inaccessible) possibilities of pre-2008.
Maintenance doesn't really matter when you're trying to just get into something as a novice and voraciously create.
A larval developer's gateway project is all but guaranteed to end up as an incomprehensible mess of spaghetti that'll fall to pieces at the lightest touch after a summer of plugging away at it, but that's not what's important. What's important is that they could make something -- something real. By the time it's left as a shambling pile of kluges and bad practices that'll never see the light of day again, it's still gotten far enough to inspire something, and serves as a great point to move on to greater ambitions -- or even start from scratch with one's lessons learned and make it better, perhaps with a more advanced toolset that now seems infinitely more approachable than it did at the beginning.
This isn't a discussion about tools to create software that'll be refined, depended on, and passed on to new developers over the span of years. It's about bridging the gap between restrictive toys and actual non-trivial projects for novices to tinker with.
That part is (hopefully) obvious to the typical HN reader, but the fact that some things that make maintenance harder also make it easier for non-developers is sometimes missed.
I would contend Flash was a miserable developer tool, a near feature-free IDE, and rather than "balance", it took a kitchen sink approach to letting you put any kind of code anywhere...in an object, on the document, in a UI event of a button, on a frame.
Meanwhile, there are quite a few flash-likes for HTML5, and many of them are smart enough not to use Canvas (much)!