Honestly, you're conflating two things.

1. VLIW exposes microarchitectural details, locking them in like an ABI. Updates to the microrachitecture will require changes to the ISA, thereby breaking backwards compatibility with every generation.

2. The dominant programming paradigm is sequential code, often just old C code with heavy pointer aliasing and little compile time extractable parallelism. This reduces static parallelism in the code base and shifts it into a runtime problem. The CPU discovers the dependencies at runtime instead. If you built a programming language that exposes more parallelism (think something like ParaSail), this problem wouldn't be as big as it is for C style programming languages.

Nobody will build a language for architectures that suffer from backwards compatibility problems, so why bother? VLIW is primarily suited for ASIPs and not much else.