You are right. I've done a lot of development in AIR myself and it is super impressive. Easy TypeScript like language. The Flex SDK is mature with all the standard stylable controls you need. Dedicated IDE that just works great. Easy deployment. I was able to build a cross platform (iOS/Android/Web/Desktop) video chat application with it and it looked and worked great everywhere. Someone dropped the ball somewhere with AIR.. I'm amazed they're still updating it.. that's something at least.

I guess it lives on here? https://github.com/apache/royale-asjs Still looks active..

Here's a demo https://royale.apache.org/tourdejewel

Apache Royale is not the same thing it allows to compile ActionScript to JavaScript and so publish for the web

Adobe AIR is a compiler and a runtime

for iOS it compile AOT, for other platforms: Android, Windows, macOS, (and Linux) it compile JIT

the runtimes share the AVM2 (ActionScript Virtual Machine) and the Flash Platform API, which allow to share a lot between platforms

I think it was sullied by the poor reputation of the Flash Player browser plugin.

I agree that ActionScript was a pretty decent language to work in.

I investigated Haxe briefly but found the community wasn't very big and the community that did exist was really fragmented.

Indeed ActionScript is a pretty decent language to work with

imagine if you could write command-line tools and server-side apps with it, that would be the dream