I'm also interested in seeing what happens with Ruffle can eventually play all (or say 99%) of the Flash files out there.

Will they continue on, and make a "next generation flash" or something?

aka Flash Done Right :)

The doors have been open for quite some time now for someone to build Flash Done Right. Some have tried. But they never catch on.

That's a good point. It'd need both widespread adoption of the player, and some kind of good authoring environment.

Interestingly enough, the Ruffle player itself is looking like it'll achieve that wide spread adoption. If a "Flash Done Right" type of thing was included in that by default, then it'd just leave the authoring tools piece missing.

Others have pointed out that Godot has timeline functionality similar to the old Flash (authoring) interface. So maybe the authoring tools piece would mean existing authoring tools (like Godot) would be able to add a "Flash Done Right" output target and call it a day.

Seems like an approach that would work.

Particularly for vector-based animated movies, can achieve much higher quality-per-bandwidth than compressed raster graphics, and are future-proofed to automatically handle higher video resolutions.

This part itself is probably a lost art forever. As are many things that required great efficiency. Apart from a few embedded specialties. I feel the same pain though, watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB.

"watching a HomestarRunner video or something by means of a 200MB video when I know the SWFs were like 100KB."

WOW

yeah, a lot of flash content that was SVG exclusive can go up past 4k and look stunning, and flash was the only one around then (and debatably, now) with an editor to let someone leverage that

yeah. the closest to getting flash back is Ruffle, which works pretty well, and Newgrounds does flash game jams still, so it ain't all dead