The point everyone is making is that you could have modernized the VB6/Lazarus approach to meet modern needs and it would have been much more productive than what we have currently with html+css.

And indeed, many of the complaints people have about VB6 not supporting multiple resolutions, etc, are fixed in Lazarus.

it's possible that the people i was talking to meant that, but i took them to mean something much stronger, that there are things that were easy and fluent in vb6 that are clumsy in dhtml. and i'd like to know what those things were, but text is not a good medium for that

christine lavin wrote a song about your interpretation https://mojim.com/usy144575x1x8.htm in which she says

    The reality of me
    cannot compete
    with the dreams you have of her.
    And the love you've given me
    is not as sweet
    as the feelings that she stirs.
    And so you turn away
    and you say that you're sorry,
    But you must pursue this dream,
    this improbable dream.
    Though things have not been bad,
    you can't say you've had
    Quite as good a time as it first seemed.

some software that could have been written is always better than all software that has actually been written

The conversation often goes like this.

creating UI's in VB6 was so much faster and easier than html+css

yeah, but they're not reactive to resolution changes.

me: but they could have been updated rather than throwing them away and going with the complexity of today's solution.

the person i was talking to seemed to be saying the opposite: that vb6 uis adapted better to window size changes than html. i'd like to understand what they meant

css has gotten pretty complex, but html isn't inherently complex