Lot of it was bad, sure, but there was so much games and animation done by literal kids back then, because of how easy it was to create something with the tooling. Nothing even come close today, unfortunately.

The JimCarrey.com website was cool. That's about the only flash thing I came across that was though. Now gone as a site but recorded on video https://youtu.be/B1XZixLBurQ I'm not sure you can do those things in javascript to this day?

Sounds like you didn't experience all the awesome flash games and animated videos etc that people made.