I knew some hackers who used it back in the day. They were the types who were good with computers and could write shell scripts, but they were not professional programmers. They knew how to do what they needed done. The people I know today who are into vibe coding kind of fit that same mold. They want something done and they do it themselves, but they aren't necessarily good at coding or enjoy doing it.

Ehh, I dunno, it was really, really popular back then. I would bet that a non-trivial number of apps were built using VB by actual software engineers. Couldn't find concrete numbers but this article claims at its peak, 2/3rds of all business apps on Windows PCs were in VB: https://retool.com/visual-basic

I recall seeing inventory management systems, airline booking apps for travel agents, custom CRMs, internal LoB apps, check-in kiosks, vending machines, etc. with the tell-tale VB UI, especially the typical VB error dialog after a crash!

I messed around with several other UI toolkits of that era -- AWT, Swing, Qt, Flex/ActionScript -- and none was as productive as VB for simple apps. It was just the right amount of simplicity and development velocity for the myriad simple use-cases that were perfectly happy with rigid layouts.