Your 90s area PC also had disk swapping and wasn’t running on a tiny battery. The Flash of 2007 was much more processor intensive and in the 90s, I doubt you were streaming quality video with Flash.
Mostly because a whole generation lost that part, and finds cool putting Web everywhere, saying this as someone that also does Web projects, I only don't see a value using it as a hammer for all kinds of nails.
Apparently the whole Windows UI mess is also related to Microsoft not able to hire new folks with Windows development experience, probably they only saw Win32 after joining Microsoft, funny how things come around.