I think you're remembering Flash with rose tinted glasses. It's a scripted environment—you can make it do anything given enough time. Almost nobody ever did.
Adobe's Flex framework (now open source at Apache) made it possible to build a responsive layout in a few minutes... not much time needed at all (that's where the name "Flex" comes from). Some of the people who built Flex went on to build AngularJS at Google. There's nothing rose tinted about it -- Flash/Flex were definitely an important and positive influence on modern web frameworks.
