[fafner]

It's not gone from YT! It's certainly on its way out. But despite the announcement I still see Flash as default in Firefox and even in Chrome it sometimes falls back to Flash (happens to me when I start a video, put my laptop to sleep, and continue the video after resume).

[acdha]

It looks like the main change was enabling HTML5 for every video. I haven't had Flash enabled for a couple years – previously many videos (IIRC everything with ads) would display the missing plugin error page. Now it falls back to <video> but since they built it wrong, that only happens if Flash is completely unavailable — any sort of click-to-play will still result in using Flash.