You are describing 1998 VB as much as 2022 html+javascript
VB6 (the last one) was 1998, same year as win98, which listed a 486+16M of ram as its system requirements. Which was a big step up from a W95 386 with 4M of ram. So one probably didn't want to run VB itself on those smaller machines, but the resulting apps definitely did, and those low end desktops were exactly what a lot of vb apps were running on.
VB and its ilk were used to write apps that were used in a very specific way. Many times companies wrote apps not just their business use cases, but literally with the expectation of the hardware their users had in the office, the network they were on and who would be maintaining the machines. Ultra rigid user experiences, but still somehow were bug prone.
Today its like, oh yeah, a user had an issue, they were searching our million record database on their smart toaster, one of the table columns weren't aligned correctly and it was slow to load.