Can't upvote this enough. People have very selective memory of how the 2000s web worked. Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere. Incredibly fucked up tables with no semantic meanings in your HTML just to do what modern flexbox now does in two lines. No one cared about accessibility of anything. Clicking on anything can get you pwned because you never updated your Flash player which has an RCE vulnerability. And yes, so many websites will tell you to use Internet Explorer for best experience.

I get being frustrated with some aspects of the modern web. But a lot of people are reminding of that Naomi Wolf tweet about how Belfast was calm and peaceful in the 1970s.

You're referring to the mid-late 2000s. I'm talking about the early 2000s. You can hate Flash all you want, but for all the HTML5 hype we had back then, there isn't a single authoring tool today that's not even equivalent to the original Flash Studio (by Macromedia). It was the only tool in internet's entire history where both artists and programmers could work on together. Or sometimes even without each other.

What do you have now with all your fancy React and JS libraries that's pulled off something that Flash did?

Flash died because of the carcinogen that Adobe is. It could have been the future of HTML5 had they actually invested in it.

Look at the pathetic state of HTML5 today. What tool should a non-coder use to output something you could do with keyframes on Flash studio in 5 minutes in the 2000s? There's absolutely nothing quite the equivalent of Flash. You need to write 100+ lines of code to get something decent out of HTML5 that involves animation. There are paid niche tools, but nothing at the scale of what Flash pulled off.