It's both, really. HTML makes it really easy to do "corporate branded" fancy buttons, but you still have to jump through hoops to do something that could be done with a database and the stock data grid widget in <10 lines of code in VB or Delphi.
That old VB code that queried the database directly wouldn't work well over a non-local network.
ie there is a bit of apples and oranges comparison here.
You also might not need any access control, network traffic security, cross platform deployment, instant install, evergreen updating, trivial UI integration ( links ) etc etc.
If you really want something simple you could use Excel, Access or Filemaker as a front end.
I agree life has got more complex - and in some cases unnecessarily so - case in point it's becoming increasingly hard to write web apps without SSL - even if you don't need it.