You can still have that experience with VB.NET, C#, Delphi, FreePascal, Gambas, Xojo and C++ Builder.

Instead folks go with Electron crap.

TCL/Tk too, albeit being far less intuitive than Lazarus+FreePascal. Altough it has far less code, so it's a draw on difficulty. The average Joe would just spend time measuring the sizes of the frames and that's it.

In a sense yeah, but as far as I remember it never had a good UI designer.

Well, MessageBox() in the Win32 API is just a simple C function call: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...

I wrote a blog about this many years ago: https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/simple-windows-dial...

It’s everything leading up to the MessageBox() call that VB makes trivial.