Today the tooling is just better. Just think, for instance, of the go and rust tool chains which easily produce ready to ship EXE files. Classical toolkits such as Qt still are around.
It was very common for Delphi programs to use stuff that required external DLLs.
The only difference is that a lot of apps prioritize cross platform UIs over good, fast native UIs.
WinForms and WPF are still well supported.
https://apps.gnome.org/Builder/
You can do the same thing. In fact, this was the exact method I used to make a few GTK apps.
I was able to load up a VB6 project I worked on in high school and it compiled and ran with no changes. Pretty neat.
And I'll take needing an internet connection over having to install Visual Basic from a stack of CDs.
<button onclick="alert('Hello')">Command1</button>Not native GUI, but as fast and useful as one.
It's more limited nowadays, but you can still do a lot.
Is that from OP or HN?