A little bit later, there was visual editors for gui app like Delphi and Visual Basic and co.

Despite VB to be a little bit shitty, I think that a big loss happened in the GUI software development world since web apps became the norm.

Not many remember this world where you could easily graphically create your UIs by placing components and that reactive interface were a given without effort.

I really miss the original Delphi before things went DotNet shitty...

The nicest thing about programming for DOS (or probably any old home computer or console?) is that you are in full control of inputs and timing. If you only need to update the screen when the user hits a key for instance you can just call a function to wait for the next key-press, handle that, ask for the next... There is no async, no callbacks, no events, no threads. Nothing is easier than just imperative code doing things one line then the next, then the next. You can still have a main loop, but you do not need to, and if some function you call somewhere to handle something wants to wait for a key-press before returning it can do that and you do not have to yield or anything.

I'd love to see some modern environment replicate that somehow. Let us pretend everything is simple and synchronous even if it very much isn't.