When you consider the mainstream alternatives back then, by the time you've got the message-loop boilerplate working... in VB6 you've already created a functioning form with a database connection.
When you consider the mainstream alternatives back then
Folks always seemed to rave about Delphi. That seemed like the "grown up", "better" version of VB, though I never used it.
But yeh, Delphi was much better than VB (like how turbo pascal was better than QBasic), however it was more of a niche environment used mostly by independent vendors making consumer apps.
There is a reason why we still have Delphi conferences over here.
I think Angular has a way to intercept http calls but you would need to build a translation layer. None of this is obvious to someone picking this up for the first time.
The whole paradigm is a hack that requires a very experienced dev to navigate.
Maybe I'm missing something.
That part won't change AFAICT, but you can imagine a reasonable abstraction over it as part of a "batteries included" ecosystem in which events from the UI (button press, keyboard capture, scroll event, etc) are mapped seemlessly via configuration to user-defined functions that happen to run within the nodejs process with an SDK that allows developers to interact back w/ the UI in a similar manner. Resulting in a developer experience very similar to what you got with VB6.
I still think there is a really successful app ecosystem waiting to be built that is semantically similar to VB6 + Access but built with a more modern stack like SQLite + Electron + TypeScript.