VB6 is still going strong. As answers to most vb6 questions are available on the web since forever, people rarely ask vb questions on stackoverflow. If you look at vbforums.com you can still have 500+ people at any time viewing the "vb6 and earlier" forum. And that's just one of many vb forums.

We should define "going strong"?

MS basically killed it, in 200x when the VB.NET snafu happened. I assume 100% of the VB work is legacy at this point and since solid architecture or design principles were never this language's strong points, it can't be particularly exciting legacy work either.

It's basically a career and technological dead-end.

You could say the same about COBOL. Just because it's "dead" doesn't mean that businesses don't have tens to hundreds of thousands to even millions of lines of code hanging around in these "dead" languages.

While it may not be exciting work, not every programmer is looking to do the latest and greatest thing that will appear at the top of HN. They make good money because the business knows paying someone well to maintain it is better that paying a team to rewrite it. That's why one of the issues with COBAL programmers is retiring and passing on, not leaving to go to a NodeJS shop.

Yes, and if they'd said Rust was more popular than COBOL, that would also have been damning with faint praise.

These ranking aren’t something to take very seriously. They are ballpark estimated at best, and a better measure is growth of the community and adoption in larger open source projects that people actually use.

Comparison with VB is a mark of respect everywhere except HN echo chamber.

I can only assume you're joking. VB was never respected, it had a reputation back in the day of being the tool of choice for shoddy drag & drop Windows GUI apps.

On Windows C++ was the tool of choice and Delphi was kind of a secret weapon for GUI development. Then C# happened, and MS unceremoniously flushed VB down the drain. The VB community was outraged about VB.NET...