All Jobs did was pull the trigger. Nobody trusted him any father than they could throw him, but he had the final say on a truly massive segment of the market, so if he says he's had enough then it would be suicidal to ignore him.
The network has always prospered through open standards and cooperation. When the web reached the point that it could no longer move in the direction it wanted because it's retarded cousin was busy picking it's nose in the corner the obvious move was to simply advance the standard past that point.
Flash is a relic from an era when implementing core functionality through plugins made sense. It's always been a pain in the ass for users, right alongside nonsense like embedded Java applets. It fills the vital niche of "thing that constantly breaks".
It's not sensible to compare Flash to browsers or operating systems in terms of number of vulnerabilities either. The scope of responsibility, overall complexity, and purpose are radically different. Flash should be beating the pants off everyone in that list. The only direct competitor you listed was at 1/3 the incident rate. As Flash has dominated it's segment for so long it should be winning that fight as well.
Keep in mind also that the numbers there are browsers running HTML5, so their counts include the functionality that replaces Flash as well as their other duties.
In terms of economics, Flash took advantage of a natural monopoly (http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/natural-monopoly/), and when it's deadweight drag (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss) became too obnoxious (more costly than standardization) it was replaced by a utility. If you want to complain about tech giants with cornered markets then it doesn't make sense to balk at that process.
What type of frameworks are more popular games using?
We used to do social games in Flash (still supporting a few current ones) and let me tell you that it is a good thing it is quickly going away. It has so many issues and security problems. Adobe seems to have never cared to fix the core issues with the platform but still kept on pushing updates with new features that I don't think many people cared about. We get so many client problems that we can never really repo as it just seems to be a combination of Flash and the users computer. Not that HTML5 is a great replacement at this point but it is getting better.
AIR on the other hand isn't a bad platform. Combined with Starling you can get some pretty decent performance. With Android you can get rid of the "air." prefix Adobe tries to slap on your package name so players don't even know they are playing a Flash game. But as usual Adobe always lags behind on platform support. New versions of iOS and Xcode are always a problem. Not until almost a year after iOS 10 beta SDK has been out has AIR been able to target iOS 10 as the base SDK. It worked before but there were some workarounds and probably resigning your app to get it to submit. AIR does have legitimate desktop support as well. So it is very possible to have the same game run on web, mobile, and desktop with no code changes. Not a lot of frameworks can say that.
If you are just starting out and don't really know what you want to do yet and ActionScript seems interesting to you then go ahead and start making games with it. Flash and AIR are still going to be around for quite a long time in the indie scene. But if you want to make a job out of this there are better tools to start with that are actually going to be used in the industry for years to come.
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