Some of you might remember when a 3mb flash animation could pack in some 5 minutes of animation, with the more advanced ones even having chapter/scene selectors, which could also include clickable easter eggs and other kinds of interactions during the scenes.
I built websites and apps in flash. It was awesome. You could do a lot, especially in the later years, 3d games, anything was possible.
It was so easy and clean to create smooth animations, transformations, it was limitless. It’s a travesty that we got no replacement. You could do more quicker in the year 2005, than you can do today.
All of that is possible with modern JS and WebGL
Really I think a lot of this stems from a toolset designed for programmers, and not one designed for artists.
Sure it’s possible, but you can’t actually do it. Because you need a dedicated programer and you need to convey as a designer what to do, so it’s time consuming and expensive. Elaborate scifi UIs are extremely rare now.
After flash was killed, a big portion of creativity died with it. Every webpage started to look the same. I know I’m romanticizing it, but there is truth in that.
I try to avoid recommending proprietary software but FYI the multimedia authoring tool formerly known as FutureSplash Animator which you presumably knew as Adobe Flash Professional (or perhaps Macromedia Flash before that) in fact lives on today as Adobe Animate and it can now target HTML5/SVG/WebGL/etc.
There are also many free/libre open source alternatives to it.
There where just as many cheesy UI’s done without flash back in the day. Its because web development became more of a commodity as more people got into it. Everything’s been done and the cheapest thing to do is to slap together something using the framework of the month.
These days, with the help of some LLM generating substandard, unchecked code.