Back in the days we had this in programming as well with palettes of drag & drop components.

It is kind of broken now, much thanks to using web applications (and applications that are basically just wrappers for web applications), but I don't know I if want to go back.

On one side it was much easier when I could hack together a program that was good enough (since everything was the same bland grey).

On the other hand some programs certainly looks nicer today.

And it has become easier to compose logic with solutions like Maven, Nuget and the various frontend package managers.

But yes, we lost drag and drop UI development, we lost consistency and we lost a lot of UX (at least temporarily).

I think there's a lot of potential for some more old-school UI in business software. People using points of sale, CRM/ERP/PLM/etc. systems, intranet portals, and so on don't really care about how nice it looks. Efficiency is more important.

Especially if it can be easy for non-technical people to build efficient UIs and databases (so they don't have to resort to spreadsheet contraptions), I think there's an opportunity here...