They paved the way to the semantic web, which paved the way to Google extracting the data and building its own maps, shopping, and answers, and ratings and images and a bunch of other experiences on top of it and taking over traffic that would have gone to the web sites instead. Then AI scraped the same and now web traffic is becoming even less web. Flash made the web an experience - a place to visit and explore way before the metaverse. Web standards extracted the data. Now it’s pre-chewed and digested down to a AI answer.