Visual Basic and other "RAD" builders were pretty neat and I think platforms like WordPress or Drupal never captured their charm. For one, any apps built on them need a rather complex runtime, which feels worse to me than a language's standard library or the JVM. It's a far cry from dragging in a button and then referencing it as a variable in code.

Second, the graphical niceties of these platforms often run "in-process", and save what is basically code in the same database as content. This will anger most Smalltalk fans, but I think this style of development is a bad idea. I want to know that some folder full of source code is the program, and some other folder is the data, and that if I back up one or the other, it will be independently usable.

I'm not saying 90s IDEs were perfect, but I don't think there's been any successful successor to their style of development. Graphical GUI builders exist, but they usually don't support making web apps, and after working with modern JS GUI frameworks, manually syncing GUI state with app state seems antiquated and needlessly bug-prone. I suppose QML with Qt Creator comes closest.