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The drag and drop GUI designers used to work because most people were using screens that were approximately the same size and resolution for the most part back then. That is no longer the case today when there is pressure to support everything from a smart watch all the way up to a UHD 4K monitor or TV. Fixed layouts are also much more difficult to localize and translate to other languages than modern layout systems.

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And yet, I found Apple's Interface Builder to work pretty well, for apps that should work on phones and tablets in both portrait and landscape mode.

Mind you, this was a long time ago now.

Apple's IB used a constraint-based layout by default. It was a fairly novel idea at the time. HTML was ill-suited for that until flexbox/grid came along.

Yeah, it’s stunning how many UIs fit within their struts and springs model, and how well they model scales to resolution changes.

Modern drag and drop designers / components do support flexible layouts

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