Comment by booty

VB6 sure looks nice, but I promise it was a hostile mess for anything besides simple GUI apps.

Also, trust me, the VB6 interface hits a lot different (which is to say: worse) on a cramped 800x600 or 1024x1768 monitor than whatever spacious thing you're probably viewing it on. =)

    Makes it that much more absurd that tooling on modern 
    platforms isn't anywhere near this level of discoverability 
    and developer-friendliness.

I can think of a few concrete reasons why.

1. The VB6 UI element palettes work well because there's essentially a 1:1 correlation between the icon and the thing it produces when you drop it onto the canvas. That works well for visual elements but less well for things that don't have visual analogs.

2. Toolbars/palettes don't scale well past a few dozen items, whereas a VSCode-style command palette or text command autocomplete can scale nearly infinitely.

3. The way HTML works is a totally different paradigm than VB6's fixed grids. Obviously (as this demo shows) you can do that in HTML, as long as you're willing to ship stuff that kind of works like a VB6 app.