As others have said, there's no money in it for all the reasons they've laid out. It's the new world economy. Sites that make you buy credits to talk to people - along with other monetizing efforts - are the ones making money.
Got contacted for VB6 Dev work, there programmer retired, not the only 1 using 20+ year old software LOL Heard rumours they where making a VB7 same style as VB6 just upto date, sadly no sign.
I Know it vaguely, well got a cheat sheet of Syntax hanging around from the last time I had to learn it and code it, and Java Script for Google Sheet app and various other languages. No body wants it, RARE, I don't turn it down or choose to code in it unless I really have to. Still miss coding games Amiga and C64 in Assembly been 30years FFS
We need hardcore coders. We have systems that have a million lines of badly written code. I go into that code base with my java debugger just like i used to when i programmed Z80 assembly back in 1984 I program in java but its really just conditions, iterations and assignment statements grouped into procedures. You dont need to know any particular Tech stack, they are mostly all the same. Use stack overflow to help with most common problems. And grind out solutions to the rest with hard work. Best programmers have experience, intelligence and hard work ethic. A lot of the programmers i see lack the last one (hard work ethic). Lazy entitled slackers who don't want to do any work, think they should be paid $100+ an hour just because they have in demand skills.
I don't think I came across any of those. I did come across people who were saying that below $X dollars an hour they cannot maintain their current lifestyle and are not willing to work in the field. By lifestyle I mean mortgage, family, etc - not luxuries. There must be a threshold below which you will refuse to work as hard, no?
Its not always obvious as the slackers are normally very good bull shitters and give the impression they are working hard. GIT commit logs are great to find the slackers. You don't tell them you are monitoring the logs. But i see people doing 50x the work of others when i look at the logs. And its not about quality over quantity either. The slower devs take time even on the easier issues. In fact they love to take easier issues and work on them for a week or more. They can show progress without breaking a sweat.
I heard the same rumors. But the last I heard, the Office team supporting VBA(/VB6) has its focus on supporting automation within the Office suite, rather than evolving into an independent language. Its certainly not going away anytime soon ... how would finance departments survive ? (I'm kidding of course ... sort of)
Do you see much demand for Python/R? If there were a business case ($$$) for migrating my existing systems that's likely the direction I'd go.
Never been asked for it, but I generally deal with either small companies and the only big 1, I just write stuff easy to do in VB, don't get involved with any Programming Departments to see what they use. I'm 100% Merc, not spending time, unless I'm getting paid learning any new systems.