> meticulously hand place elements and align them
You don’t need as much meticulousness as you imagine. Have you tried placing some text boxes in Keynote or PowerPoint and hand aligning them?
> for the auto-resizing logic to fuck things up.
Auto-resizing is often unnecessary during rapid prototyping. Even in prod, even if you are developing internal apps in an enterprise environment, it’s still not necessary. Make your window non-resizable if you are targeting native, and set a fixed viewport <meta> for web apps.
> define new composable widgets
The kind of people who are enjoying VB6 don’t need new widgets let alone composable widgets. Just use whatever widgets that are builtin.
Basically your entire comment is describing the kind of complexity that I said was not always necessary.