VB.net and C# (and F#) are free [legal] downloads from the internet and both just as capable as VB6 was back in the day (the things Visual Studio Pro and above add aren't really relevant to beginners, except the testing framework perhaps).

Plus back in the day I found VB 6 quite limiting. For 101 level stuff it is plenty fine, but once you want to go beyond simple applications (e.g. games) you're left almost fighting the language and libraries itself.

With C# in particular, while it is certainly slower than Go/C/C++/D/etc, that's really the only major limitation. You can definitely access much more of Windows' API infrastructure, it supports unsafe code, the .Net framework is more comprehensive, and the language features are extremely modern (F# more so). There really is no limits except execution speed.

Honestly kids today are extremely lucky. I would have killed to be learning on C# back in my day. Fuck VB 6.