From Homestar Runner to Salad fingers to badgers, stick figure battles, and the End of Ze World, this — dare I call it an artform? — was a cultural touchstone for a generation.
Flash made vector animation available to the masses, and internet distribution of the relatively small video files was a piece of cake. With the filetype now essentially deprecated, the creators gone on to bigger and better things, the distribution sites shut down, it is a dead form. Most of it will be lost forever, although there may be someone archiving some of it for posterity.
I’m a little surprised nothing came to take the place of flash.
There are lots of animation tools that export to video, and there are WYSIWYG web editors that allow for interaction and movement.
But nothing really came out, built on html5, that let you easily create interactive motion narratives or games, so that you could just upload them somewhere.