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I've been toying with Turbo Pascal 5.5 running on FreeDOS on an old laptop. There's something really relaxing about it, compared to modern programming.

Turbo Pascal 5.5 with objects was the pinnacle of my programming enjoyment. Python 3 is catching up.

Because the development itself has changed immensely. The closest experience today is probably the one of developing for Arduinos.

Homebrew scene for consoles and graphing calculators too, I'd say. I think the overarching reason is that you know the platform you're developing for all the way down to the hardware.

I loved Turbo Pascal back in the 90s, that was the first IDE I ever used.

I think Visual Studio 6 is equivalent in ease of use and user experience -- that's what I learned C++ on back in the early 2000s, before the influx of Java and Python into academia.

Free Pascal is still around, and still includes a text mode IDE written in their own fork of Turbo Vision.