What has died, is the maturity of microsofts tool set, they keep changing their concept/design/platform.
silverlight/wpf/uwp/winui2|3/etc..
vb was around for nearly 2 decades and had a very mature tool set, everything since then hasn't gotten nearly that sort of life span or dedication to tool sets.
Developing in visual studio now, is more like web dev in the 2000s, I can't tell you how often you have to go to the xaml and make correction or adjustments that the UI just can't get right, or just goes bonkers and can't render the UI at all until something is fixed.
It is really sad, because the power of those old drag and drop builders that just worked meant that prototyping and mocking up applications was much much faster.
now standing up a UI based project takes ages, I'll usually do a console application now, and are dumping results to a API or console.