At least there was a distinction between web of documents (WWW) and shipped apps with custom canvas. Rendering apps with web’s DOM is stupid. It makes websites a mess and relies on everyone using the same monoculture of browsers (like we now have Chromium, WebKit and Gecko, all nearly identical).
If browser does not support one feature (like CSS’s transform), the whole house of cards breaks. It’s like making ASCII art in notepad and then expecting everyone to use the same notepad app with the same font and style, to not break our art proportions.
We need to split web into websites and webapps, with webapps being browser dependent or full custom canvases and websites being immutable human-readable and editable format.
You downloaded and installed Flash on your machine, including all it’s security vulnerabilities. In fact Flash security became a meme on the early internet for how bad it was.
It’s not about how do you get the functionality, if this is build-in, plugin or additional OS-level software. But rather about using HTML+CSS like if they would forever only have one implementation (WebKit and adopted to it Gecko), which is super unhealthy for the web.
Old web stuff is either super broken, or just looks ugly because modern standards have evolved significantly. I don’t see how what’s done today is any different.
All modern standards are great. HTML5 should enable far more user control over the look of the website.
But how we use the standards is the problem. We treat them as if Chromium/Gecko is the one ever lasting implementation and hacking around it. Example are animated icons done not by simple .webp file, but using many nested divs and hacky CSS, which is going to work… Unless it does not work.