I started with Delphi 5 and completely share the sentiment of OP, development experience (mainly when building GUIs) was way better back then. For anyone who feels similarly I can only recommend you to look into Anvil. It is a fantastic tool, under active development and with a helpful and supporting community. It allowed me to build web apps by myself that I previously thought about hiring someone for. Very enjoyable experience and of course the fact that I am building web apps instead of desktop apps is a big plus in many scenarios today.

Great to see you here, Merdedydd! I was thinking about sending this thread to you. I discovered Anvil in a similar thread years ago and am very happy I did.