My point is not that you can't reproduce any single thing with an HTML5/JS workflow. You certainly can.
My point is that:
The technical burden to do all the things you would typically use flash for (quickly create some complex animated vector art + stick some code on it + distribute it as a single file) is much higher and requires multiple toolsets that are not necessarily standardized or obvious to an entry level user. An entry level flash tutorial would show you how to do all these things and it would just work. An entry level HTML5/JS tutorial requires multiple dependencies and scary toolsets to a newcomer, assumes a lot more background technical skill, and is more likely to randomly break around the edges.
There was a special happy circle of toolset + community that made something we've now lost, and I feel that the critics spent all their efforts on narrow technical points, and thus missed what really made things special for us.
The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools and that the tools for flash were refined and easy to use for a lot of people who were not necessarily deeply technical.
The lack of this specific kind of tooling and community is a clear problem. But is "HTML5" a foundational cause of the problem, or is it a scapegoat? People can legitimately disagree.
