You're not misremembering. There was an enormous setback in the usability of GUI programming when the web was invented. The first reason is that the whole platf

You're not misremembering. There was an enormous setback in the usability of GUI programming when the web was invented. The first reason is that the whole platform is built on the jagged rubble of the 90s/2000s platform war. But the second is just that, with so many different languages and systems in play, tool and library support just can't keep up. What made Delphi great was that there was one integrated framework that knew about everything from your visual design to your databases - you could integrate them all, get autocomplete, etc. These days, we write Python that generates SQL in order to generate HTML, then write Javascript to talk HTTP to the Python and then generate HTML that gets interpreted into the screen by CSS...and there is no way a tool can present the result of that in a coherent manner (let alone autocomplete it!). (I get an up-close view of this because I cofounded Anvil - https://anvil.works https://anvil.works - which does the complete opposite of this at every level. All in Python, one framework, all autocompleted - basically a modern Delphi for the web.)