My guess is that to Adobe, "flash" was a set of authoring tools (developer IDE and bespoke language) and a runtime that allows execution in the browser. Adobe,

My guess is that to Adobe, "flash" was a set of authoring tools (developer IDE and bespoke language) and a runtime that allows execution in the browser. Adobe, as a company, sells authoring tools. It doesn't make money building runtimes and then giving them away. Even the money from licensing runtimes (Air) is insignificant. The runtime was just a necessary overhead due to inconsistent and poor native rendering capabilities in the browser - it existed solely to allow the development of powerful authoring tools. So after browsers improved their native support and announced they are dropping support for the plugin, Adobe migrated to a new version of the authoring tools (Adobe Animate) that can compile to the legacy flash player runtime if needed, but also to html/js, or svg, or other targets. They still want to sell more of the authoring tools. They don't particularly care about flash, and are probably happy to be rid of it. What they don't want is someone else taking control over the runtime and then building rival authoring tools for it, opening it up to other authoring tools, or creating any kind of rival authoring eco-system. It's like if you give away razors to sell your own blades, and then you come up with razor 2.0, you still don't want people taking the razor 1.0 and keeping it alive by selling their own blades for it, or even giving away their own blades for it, as then you would be in competition with yourself. Whether these business concerns are justified or not, or whether our IP laws are too extreme, is a separate question. These aren't simple questions.