I agree with your observation, but in this case, it makes sense. As someone with a permanent preexisting condition, I am the only person I know that benefited from the ACA. Huge portions of my family and friends were impacted very negatively. Many of them had their rates go up 30-40% and ended up with worse insurance plans.
I am a bit bothered that the NYTimes chose to ignore a wealth of data for a major current societal problem, and just cherry-pick some category that ended up "better" to make a map and article.
I don't think they're offended by use of the word "flash." The OP is about a substitute for WebGL, which exposes low level OpenGL commands to Javascript for hardware accelerated graphics. Flash's API is neither low level nor hardware accelerated, making it a poor fit for a WebGL fallback.
I am a bit bothered that the NYTimes chose to ignore a wealth of data for a major current societal problem, and just cherry-pick some category that ended up "better" to make a map and article.