They did pull that rug, twice, in two different directions.

1) VB7 (VB.NET) entirely split the VB developer community.

2) VB6 IDE has not worked well and is entirely unsupported in every Windows after XP. It's generally recommend to build VB6 apps in an XP VM and XP being out of security support it's now a huge "Use at your own risk" and "Do your best to isolate the VM from ever having an internet connection". (Not to mention that installers like Install Shield that still understand VB6' super messy version of COM are generally also out of support and security support.)

It was alleged that Microsoft almost dropped the runtime components for VB6 in Windows 11. It starts to feel like only a matter of time before they do.

Definitely not, since it actually takes quite a lot of red tape to ship something as ancient as MSVBVM60.DLL in Windows 30 years later, and guarantee that it is still working.

It's just that it's a piece of tech from back when Microsoft corporate dominance on the desktop was at its peak, and many large companies bought into the then-current tech stack, including VB6. So now Microsoft is stuck maintaining it because those are the customers that bring consistent revenue.