Lol you're missing the point. This is a demonstration of the possibilities of pure CSS animation—it's in no way suggested that this is an efficient way to animate a 2 minute promo video.

I'll spell it out for you seeing as you seem to be having a little difficulty. Here are three ideas you can take away from this example (and perhaps use to help progress your own skill set):

1. This is a great animation made purely in CSS. If this example is possible—perhaps I can consider using CSS to achieve that really simple 4 second mp4/gif/'javascript library + after effects export' animation I've implemented in my project

2. Because this type of high quality, high performance, responsive animation is possible using CSS, perhaps we should consider simplifying the process to create something similar? Maybe this will be a library, maybe a framework, maybe a web/native app? Maybe a new animation friendly flavour of CSS.

3. "Wow this is really cool, I thought programming and markdown languages were all scary gross things like math—maybe as a designer I'll start looking into basic html5/css animations and see what cool stuff I can create" ... it's posts like this that get people interested in cross disciplinary skills and further blurs the line between designers and programmers.

What this post is not saying:

1. Look at this, it's super cool and easy. You should go and refactor all of your 2 minute animations and videos into CSS. It's way easier than flash.

You're moving the goal posts. Your original statement was: "Is this really progress". Now you're changing your argument to: "But flash was good at the time". Nobody is disagreeing with the second statement.

In regards to the first—CSS is a non proprietary, simple, modular, clear and extensible product without security flaws... and as the OP's post is pointing out—its capable of delivering high quality, responsive animations.

So yes this is progress. And the progress will continue: The way JavaScript is currently being used for progressive web apps/native app and serverside development (and now even OS programming - see Node.OS)... I wouldn't be surprised if CSS was entirely cross platform in the next 3-10 years.

There's little to no nuance in your reply. Flash was terrible for many other reasons you've chosen to ignore—at a high level it could all be boiled down to the fact that it directly contradicts a UNIX philosophy. This led to the bloat and security issues everyone rightly hates it for. Also comparing something to another equally terrible thing doesn't invalidate the fact that the first thing is still terrible. Thirdly I feel sorry for you if you think Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, Framer and even GIMP are all "alternatives" for one another lmao