I could quibble by saying that making Flash games was a gateway into programming for many of us on this platform, and I don't see similarly useful skills being

I could quibble by saying that making Flash games was a gateway into programming for many of us on this platform, and I don't see similarly useful skills being exercised by making TikTok videos. On the other hand, our elders by and large didn't see the value in computers, either, and thought we were wasting our time. So, that opinion might be me being an old man yelling at clouds! Or, more interestingly, our generation created (helped create; yeah, I know there are grey(er) beards than me on here) a world that highly values the skills we cut our teeth on messing around with Flash; the kids these days will have their turn making a world in their image, which may (read: will) have different values. I can't say what our generation's done with / to tech (or creativity in general) has been an un-alloyed good; what comes next will certainly be different, but different doesn't imply worse. The kids making TikToks right now won't think it is, and I expect that in some ways they'll be right.