So VB6 or earlier is what you are probably remembering, and VB has a fascinating history as it started life as a wysiwyg design tool before it was attached to any language.

However, you need to remember that these simpler tools were a product of a much simpler set of requirements. Fixed themes, fixed screen size, fixed aspect ratios. I imagine a wysiwyg editor that gives you all the power of, say, CSS, and yet remains simple for simple things, sounds like a much more difficult task. I haven’t worked on UI in 20 years, so maybe such tools do exist.

> a wysiwyg editor that gives you all the power of, say, CSS, and yet remains simple for simple things, sounds like a much more difficult task.

so the problem is CSS isnt it?

The constraints and flexibility of CSS makes it difficult to make a simple outcome easy to specify in similarly easy CSS.

I remember Android Studio's WYSIWYG ConstraintLayout UI builder being pretty good for responsive layouts.