Yes, I completely agree. Syntax can be a stumbling block for beginners, but is generally far easier to re-learn than core libraries, or semantics, etc. That said, the syntax shift from a basic-like language to a C-like language is slightly larger than what we are generally used to, within the C-like families. I recently had to work on some VB.Net code, and aside from the occasional "let me Google this quickly" moment for surprisingly basic concepts, it was a breeze for the reasons you mentioned.
I think the MS world of the time was very much a monoculture (and would be until circa 2010 or so), which lead to a lot of developers who had only ever really worked in one main language (plus maybe SQL / T-SQL). I tend to think this is quite similar to children growing up in a single-language vs multi-language environment. The patterns tend to get ingrained in your brain in the former, and there are few signals for our brain to understand that "this concept can actually vary from language to language, don't get too used to it", making later shifts much more difficult. It's kind of a case of over-fitting the data, which is the first language they learned, in this case. I think a lot of the VB and then VB.Net developers had this kind of strong mono-culture of language, which compounded the need to keep VB.Net alive for longer. This may have been further compounded by VB's image as a beginner-friendly language, which a lot of people took up to get into the industry as outsiders, without any formal or informal experience. I really do think this might be the main factor. VB.Net may have had a few tiny advantages in terms of semantics (slightly looser casting and conversion rules), syntax clarity ("static" vs "Shared" - an example of a keyword which is objectively clearer in VB, IMHO), or some convenience libraries (I recall occasionally having to reference core .VisualBasic assemblies to get hold of some helper method which was missing on the C# side, for no apparent reason). But it also had just as many detractors, and I would not think any of these were nearly enough to lead to people choosing it over C#.
I think the MS world of the time was very much a monoculture (and would be until circa 2010 or so), which lead to a lot of developers who had only ever really worked in one main language (plus maybe SQL / T-SQL). I tend to think this is quite similar to children growing up in a single-language vs multi-language environment. The patterns tend to get ingrained in your brain in the former, and there are few signals for our brain to understand that "this concept can actually vary from language to language, don't get too used to it", making later shifts much more difficult. It's kind of a case of over-fitting the data, which is the first language they learned, in this case. I think a lot of the VB and then VB.Net developers had this kind of strong mono-culture of language, which compounded the need to keep VB.Net alive for longer. This may have been further compounded by VB's image as a beginner-friendly language, which a lot of people took up to get into the industry as outsiders, without any formal or informal experience. I really do think this might be the main factor. VB.Net may have had a few tiny advantages in terms of semantics (slightly looser casting and conversion rules), syntax clarity ("static" vs "Shared" - an example of a keyword which is objectively clearer in VB, IMHO), or some convenience libraries (I recall occasionally having to reference core .VisualBasic assemblies to get hold of some helper method which was missing on the C# side, for no apparent reason). But it also had just as many detractors, and I would not think any of these were nearly enough to lead to people choosing it over C#.