This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.
By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.
HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.
Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.
The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.