In all fairness, AIR was successful despite Adobe. As @tuarua illustrated, there are "33,000 apps in the Android App Store built with AIR". That doesn't include the Apple app store, or the countless other places it's been used outside of mobile.
Three years running at CES (2014, 2015 and 2016), it won top place for mobile application development (consumer).
All this in the midst of a general developer community playing a game of, "Flash is dead, pass it on", as though it was something that didn't also apply equally to other browser plugins like Java and Unity, rather ignorant of the fact that AIR != Flash.
Adobe have done nothing to address the unwarranted tarnishing of AIR's reputation.
Despite all that, it still won awards, still maintained a developer base. The SDK even now, is still being maintained although it was a bit shaky there this year. Compare what it can do to any other framework and you'd be hard pressed to find anything so accessible, so complete, so affordable, so robust.
That's gotta say something about the quality of this SDK and the people that made it happen, despite the brand they work for.