Flash the thing to make websites and games.
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Before the mid 2000s, web pages could not change. If you were on a website like Ebay, you’d tell the website “I want to search for a used pink bathrobe,” and the website’s server would build a unique webpage filled with pink bathrobes and send it to you, similar to how a web designer might manually add a new webpage to a site.
As you can imagine, user’s wanted more interactivity. Things like interactive maps, games, and anything that needed to constantly react to user input was basically impossible. This is where Flash comes in, it allowed websites to add interactivity that fit a lot of these use cases, and more importantly made it pretty easy to do.
Why is it not used anymore? Better things replaced it. Web standards started to include interactivity out of the box (Javascript got more fleshed out, HTML Canvas became a thing and allowed dynamic 2D graphics, and WebSockets allowed constant updates), and thus Flash being a 3rd party app that needed constant updating (which lets face it, a lot of users aren’t going to do) meant it was deemed a security flaw and phased out.
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