I remember thinking that the Visual Basic runtime was unacceptable bloat overhead and now this. Cool work though. Also reminds me of self extracting WinZip files.
At some point in the future we will be nostalgic for the monstrosities of the present.
"ChatGPT, execute this natural language description of what the program should do"
I remember those times, as well. There was an amusing (in retrospect) period in late 90s - early 00s where one of the metrics for RAD tools of the day was how large a hello world type app is. Delphi was so popular then in part because it did very well on that metric - the baseline was on the order of 300 Kb, if I remember correctly, and you could have fairly complicated apps under 1 Mb. Visual Basic was decidedly meh on that count because between your EXE and MSVBVM60.DLL, it wouldn't fit on a single 1.44 Mb floppy.