I worked as a programmer in the 1990s, when I got paid to write things in C, C++, Perl, Khoros (I guess that's a "visual 4GL"?), IDL (the array language), VB, SQL, INFORMIX's horrible forms thing (which was not especially "visual"), sh, csh (not my fault), and occasionally Tcl. It's true that PHP, Ruby, Tcl, OCaml, and Lua came out in the 1990s (Python is from 1990, so arguably the 1980s), but they became widely used in the 2000s. In fact, even Perl was considered kind of déclassé until these "lightweight languages" took over the world, and then Perl became déclassé again after being eclipsed by Python, Ruby, and most surprisingly, JS.
(OCaml is not a "lightweight language" and is not like the others, and consequently never became popular.)
I don't recognize your description as corresponding to any events I remember. Sun was pushing Java. Microsoft was pushing C++, then Java, and then when Sun sued them, C#. Apple wasn't pushing much of anything until they bought NeXT, and then they started pushing Objective-C. As far as I know Oracle was pushing PL/SQL and cisco was pushing bletcherous IOS commands. Microsoft was pushing VB, which sort of resembles what you're saying, but VB wasn't a 4GL (the language was just 1960s Basic minus line numbers and plus subroutine arguments) and was actually spectacularly successful at what it did; it just wasn't good at making web sites. Borland was pushing Delphi. I guess in a way Microsoft was pushing Access? Are you thinking of Microsoft Access?
Maybe you were thinking of PowerBuilder? It was spectacularly successful at what it did, too (again, not building websites), and it was a visual 4GL, but it was being pushed by Powersoft, not a big corporate, until (Wikipedia tells me) Sybase bought it for 0.9 Instagrams in 1995. I never saw anybody use PowerBuilder but I didn't use Microsoft Windows a lot.
When you say, "they soon built their own", do you mean VBA and PowerShell, or what?