This ground that HyperCard or Visual Basic 6 or Flash occupied has been ruthlessly razed and salted.
This would be have been fine, so long as these systems remained relatively simple, and were rebuilt in more heavyweight but scalable languages once they reached a certain level of complexity. But that isn't what happened. Instead, they just kept growing into twisted, unmaintainable monsters that organisations were completely reliant upon, but which were an absolute nightmare to maintain and extend.
As a result, the industry shifted to encouraging the use of "real" programming languages for everything, even the simplest systems, because the greater up-front costs were saved many times over by having a sane story for long-term maintenance and improvement.
I have seen an incredible number of businesses that run off of either Excel spreadsheets, or glomped together masses of Salesforce customizations. I'm not convinced that this is an improvement in matters.
I also think that there's just a lot of custom software that doesn't get built.
That makes a certain amount of sense; I know I've sworn at insane Excel spreadsheets that have lived far longer than they should have.
The thing I'd argue is that the vast majority of business tools are only useful for very few people for a very short period of time. Sometimes they are never useful. Doing those in a "real" language can have an ROI of centuries (or never), so just never get automated or tried. There's a very important place for cheap prototyping and if non-developers can do it that's even better.
why build software that empowers people to also build software easily, when you can charge thousand of €s in consultancy fees
It is a pendulum swing between different members of the industry, some that prefer complexity as the source of their job security, and those that prefer simplicity and beauty (even if there are limitations).
Arguably NeXT IB and Objective C tried to straddle both worlds (and slid into complexity over time with iOS And MacOS)
Also See: Heroku vs Kubernetes