Well, not actually. With Anders' move to Microsoft, VB6 (aka, VB "classic") was discontinued. Microsoft supported Visual Basic syntax on the .NET runtime, but the vast majority of VB programmers considered this to be a different language because developing for the .NET Framework (remember this is ~2001) was a huge departure from VB Classic.
Many VB developers petitioned Microsoft to open-source VB6 or continue releasing improvements on it. Microsoft did not and chose to continue with their .NET + C# strategy.
At the same time, I was playing with Linux at home, and wanted tooling that could run on either platform. I learned Python at home, and then made the switch at work.
One of my last VB6 apps, thousands of lines, has been running in the plant without issue for 15 years. On one occasion I had to bump up the declared sizes of some fixed length arrays.
As for GUIs, I never found anything close to VB, but also decided to just write a thin wrapper around Tkinter and let my layout be generated automatically by default. I haven't missed laying out my GUIs, which were always a hodgepodge anyway.
VB5 in 1997 and VB6 in 1998 really closed the gap with Delphi from what I remember.
This is (from Borland's telling) not an accident. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513242
Hard to not waffle when your major competitor hires away your top talent.
VB created applications that had to ship with a shared runtime library. Windows wasn't great at versioning these libraries so developers often shipped their own VB runtime with their executable. The executable was small and the runtime was comparatively huge which had a negative impact on user perception when downloading the installers.
Before moving on to Microsoft in 1996, Anders Heilsberg was the Chief Engineer at Borland that oversaw the development and release of Delphi 1.0.
For years, VB felt like an application that could make deployable versions of itself. Delphi felt like a programming environment that compiled code into applications.
After Heilsberg moved to MS, a lot of improvements were made in VB that utlimately made Delphi less attractive, especially during Borland's strategic waffling known as "The Inprise Years": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland#Inprise_Corporation_Er...
If you want to get a feel for what it was like then check out the FOSS clone "Lazarus".