I still miss VB6 tbh.
You would just draw the UI, double click, and add code. Later versions also supported binding to data structures with one click and a few keystrokes.
Then we abandoned all that stuff in favor of the web and stuff trying to badly imitate the web like xaml.
It’s a bit shocking to me how totally out of fashion WYSIWYG is given how productive it can be.
If someone brought back that kind of experience cross platform with something like Go as the language, millions of programmer hours would be saved. Of course it won’t happen because nobody would pay for it even if it saved them thousands of hours.
It was exactly like you describe it: drag components onto a window, arrange neatly, click and set data binding and properties, double click to add some code, voila - done - a crazy rich, quick, offline or online app, doing anything you ever wanted - real estate database UI, hotel management, custom spreadsheets, radio station playlists...
As much as I love web development, it definitely never came close to that level of productivity, simplicity and effectiveness.
Still it does point to one reason that stuff died. The big one though is the transition to the web.
The Web solved the distribution/installation/update problem.
It's actually a little bit amazing to me that app stores work as well as they do. It's still higher friction to install an app than to visit a web site, but most people have accepted it.
I wrote some industrial PLC GUIs using VB.net, and it very much felt like a more "serious" version of the old VB6 stuff.