AFAIK, Visual Basic was targeted at non-professional/beginner programmers, so having wizards and designers is fine there.
My main gripe with abundance of today's "visual programming" is that we have memory-managed languages with immense expressive power and ability to write all kinds of DSLs, yet what Microsoft does is it provides crippled XML-backed designers along with half-baked frameworks and class libraries.
Microsoft has always had "half-baked frameworks and class libraries".
I actually like MFC, but it never really got past the "good for a first cut" phase, IMO. Fortunately, I've never had to deal with .NET, and besides a little MFC, most of my work is on Linux these days.
Ya, I can't begin to tell you the number of times I have been made fun of by ___ text editor fanatics for using an IDE that has wizard clicky things/drag drop components etc
Maybe you are just now noticing, but MS dev tools have always had wizard clicky things. For example, see the original Visual Basics from the 90s.