VB6 Variants were OLE VARIANTs. VB6 strings were BSTRs. VB6 arrays were SAFEARRAYs. Date, Decimal, Currency - you name it, it's all OLE.
And this went both ways, too - e.g. the reason why BSTR is called BSTR is because, well, it's a BASIC STRING... And if you want to add two OLE variants in a C++ Win32 app, with exact same semantics as in VB6, you can (to this day!) do this via VarAdd: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms2.... Ditto VarSub, VarCat etc. You can see that this family of functions is very VB-centric actually, because it has VarAdd and VarCat separately (corresponding to + and & in VB); it conflates binary and boolean operators just as VB did; and it has VarEqv and VarImp, corresponding to VB operators EQV and IMP. And yet, it lives in oleaut32.dll...
That being said, I don't mourn the loss of VB6. It was a truly horrible language, and the fact a whole generation of programmers preferred it over superior contemporary alternatives (e.g. Delphi) doesn't speak well of them. The only good thing about VB6 was its form editor, and that isn't even a language feature.