Flash games and animations is basically what really got me into the design side of web dev. Before that I was all about the code, then making silly little flash games based around in-jokes between me and my friends is what got me into graphics, animations, etc.
The global hate for flash (which is fairly warranted) drowns out the absolutely colossal impact it had on pushing the web from a purely informational thing to a platform for entertainment.
I like Flash as an idea, its just the Adobe Flash Player that everyone had a problem with. It would have received a lot more love if there were alternate implementations available, especially open source ones. It's kind of similar to how you can often find Windows users complaining about "Java" when they mean the annoying Oracle JRE that sneaks into installs and is a security mess. Nobody ever complains about OpenJDK.
The global hate for flash (which is fairly warranted) drowns out the absolutely colossal impact it had on pushing the web from a purely informational thing to a platform for entertainment.