You can't ignore how NeXT was somewhat constrained by not being able to compete head-on with Apple without incurring serious legal expenses. They got sued once right out of the gate and would certainly have been sued more if they started to cause real trouble.

Sure you can. Sun and SGI were viable for a while.

Sun and SGI had a significant head start over NeXT. By the time NeXT shipped hardware, they were moving off 68k onto SPARC and MIPS respectively, building on successful and established product lines with the kind of hardware differentiation that NeXT didn't have the capital for. That's why NeXT had to change direction and make software such a major part of their strategy; they couldn't just re-play the same strategies that Sun and SGI got off the ground with, because those niches were now pretty well occupied.

I wonder where there is the VB version for web applications.

Oracle Application Express

Isn't that ASP.net?

Kind of, but not really in regards to UI design versus the CSS/HTML/JavaScript mess.

Does Visual Basic pre-.NET/WinForms even support layout at all?

Edit: Doesn't look like it. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/182070

GUI RAD tooling is much more than just layout, and at least it can center text and quite a few other things that require CSS tricks.

Yeah HTML does layout, what about everything else?

Where are the promised components, without frameworks faking them on top of a HTML, CSS, JavaScript?

Apparently each browser still implements just part of it.

Or a designer tooling to make use of such components in RAD way like VB.