I was once hired to update a bunch of Word Basic (pre-Visual BASIC) code that generated HTA files from a bunch of Word documents that was used to maintain the ISO 9001 quality handbook for a major company. It was three weeks of torture, but it worked surprisingly well (and I say that as someone who at the time, in '96 or '97, was a devout Microsoft hater and was not inclined to look for good sides to it).
I didn't know Word BASIC or how HTA's worked at all before I got the job - had never touched it at all, and I've never needed it since, but it was simple enough that I did the planned work the first week, and spent the remaining two dragging my feet because I couldn't afford to risk telling the customer they'd severely over-estimated the effort in case they'd want to cut the contract short. I didn't feel too bad about it - I spent the extra time adding additional automation and polish, and they were pleased enough to want me back for more work the next year.
The need for low barrier to entry programming tools will always be there. Now we have stuff like https://developers.google.com/appmaker/ but it's more Crystal Reports than VB5/6. Still, there are alternatives.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application