I blame the death of Flash. Flash let a whole bunch of people make stuff who can't now. Artists, kids, people just dicking around. You could make something fun in a day and it didn't even need testing. Now you need to code properly and use git and libraries. A vast swathe of fun people have been cut off from making weird shit.
Hmm not sure on this - if I recall correctly, you needed super-expensive Adobe software to make Flash applications (or were they called "animations"?) which I am guessing most people did not have - IIRC the price of the software was several hundred GBP (£200+) in a time when a mid-range desktop PC was like £600-800. I think it also only ran on Windows and Mac OS? Its all half-forgotten memories no though so those figures may be incorrect.
HTML, Javascript and CSS is free and openly available in any browser on open source OSes as well as Windows & OSX these days. You can still make some weird stuff on the web platform if you want to, although I would agree that there are not nice WYSIWYG editors (that I am aware of anyway) that makes this easy.
