@david_chisnall the key to both was how easy it was to make an application available for others to use. And, everything you needed was there...you didn't need to deal with a half million lines of code in 4,356 files from 173 libraries from npm to stand up a GUI that people could click on and have it do stuff. VB and Flash had everything you needed to make an application or game, built in.

You can build a web app without all that bullshit using only standard web technologies and post it in all sorts of free places, but if you search for tutorials about making apps and have no idea how to do anything you are 100% getting steered into React and Tailwind and catastrophic complexity. There's gonna be tree-shaking and hydration. Server-side rendering. JSX, no, wait, TSX. Oh, how do you want to manage state? No, that's wrong, we do it this way now. Even if you want to make a desktop app or a mobile app, you're still getting shoved toward React.