Even in 2004 using adobe flash to control some industrial system was an ugly hacks

When the developer cares way more design than function

I saw some ultra fancy quotation tool that was simply a PDF with JavaScript, and it would just open adobe reader in full screen. Yes, you made it so fancy because you could use complex vectors in the background and multiple pages, and by doing this the fancy UI part was done way faster, but good luck maintaining that mess over the years