Why is this any different than Flash

I agree and raise you the point that this is Chrome-only, and doesn't even bother to mention it. Half of the spinners fail to work in Firefox stable.

I know they didn't write the spinners, but the company seems targeted at teaching:

Pathgather is an NYC-based startup building a platform that dramatically accelerates learning for enterprises

Platform lock-in on the Web is an odd thing to teach.