I believe the proper term for this is "Well there's your problem.". That sort of antisocial behavior is what caused the issue in the first place and rather than solve this by being civil enough to the user that they don't try to block everything they double down on the untrustworthiness and act /even more/ malicious.

We had _simple_ drag and drop UIs decades ago.

Computers operated within a lot more limited constructs back then. UI windows didn't resize, or it was reasonable to expect that they're fixed. How did those drag and drop tools back then handle creating a UI for screens ranging from 400pt wide to 2560pt wide?

For simpler forms you'd just set anchoring properties of the widgets in question (akRight/akBottom in Borland's VCL or whatever its counterpart is called in WinForms or what was its predecessor). Nowadays it's even easier with things like, say, GTK's HBox/VBox.

> Computers operated within a lot more limited constructs back then.

Resource limits didn't stop web browsers of the era from rendering complicated tables in a variety of sizes.

WinForms also had Dock (Left, Right, Top, Bottom, or Fill) which basically forced the control against that edge of its parent, taking up full length and/or height accordingly in one dimension, and using the explicitly specified size in the other. With multiple controls with Dock, they'd gradually fill the available space in Z-index order, stacking up against each other; then whatever control had Dock=Fill, would fill the remaining space.

So yeah, resizable windows were common, and easy to deal with. The real problem is dynamically sized controls themselves, e.g due to DPI changes, or because the control contains dynamic content of unknown size. With those, anchors no longer work well, and you need some kind of box and grid layouts. Which are available - but it's kinda hard to edit them visually in a way that's more convenient than just writing the corresponding code or markup.

The closest I've seen to visually editing UI that can accommodate dynamically sized controls was actually in NetBeans, which had its own layout manager for Swing. That thing allowed you to anchor controls relative to other controls, not just to the parent container. Thus, as controls resized according to their context, other controls would get moved as needed:

https://netbeans.org/kb/docs/java/quickstart-gui.html

https://youtu.be/_ZW4ktG1DEE?t=129

Still, you needed to be very careful in the UI form editor, to make sure that controls are anchored against other controls in ways that make sense.

Fundamentally, I think the biggest problem with UI designers today is that they can't really be WYSIWYG, the way they used to be in the RAD era. The DPI of the user machine might be different, fonts might be different, on some platforms (Linux) themes can be different in ways that drastically affect dimensions etc.

WPF and UWP can deal with it perfectly fine.

If you choose to use layouts, it can display them, but editing it with a mouse is no longer convenient. It's easier to just drop into XAML and hack on it there. On every project I worked on that used WPF (which is quite a few by now), nobody on the team actually used the UI designer, and everybody would switch the default mode for .xaml files in VS to open the markup directly, rather than the usual split view.

As for devs preferring to type by hand, well their loss I guess.

There are 2 major strategies for responding to such a difference:

1. Vector scaling. It will make the difference irrelevant and the resulting UI will look approximately the same on whatever a resolution.

2. Capacity scaling. I.e. keep the same font letting more information to fit in the control without scrolling.

It may be a little bit hard to formalize but these two can be combined intelligently. It is also important to know which one the user prefers (e.g. I mostly prefer the second while many prefer the first).

Why? What else is there? I'm actually curious. I personally have never dealt with displays bigger than 1280x1024.

This isn't true at all. The original Mac in 1984 had resizable windows for most apps. Most other WIMP GUIs followed suit.