Just like Visual BASIC 6.0, dropped for Visual BASIC.Net and Visual C#.Net because of progress. You can't expect a language to last forever or support to last forever.
Now Python 4.0 is coming out, and soon Python 3.X will lose support.
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Dirty secret: There is plenty of multi-million dollar VB 6.0 software still running out there in the world.
I think it's not even possible to compile it without a Windows XP VM but the output still runs on Windows 10.
Microsoft honestly should have provided a compatible version of Visual Basic that would run in the .NET environment instead of VB.NET. That would have allowed much more software to move over than what actually happened.
I dont know if you are being carefully specific about "compiling" as opposed to generally using the tooling (and maybe using P-code), but you can run Visual Basic 6 on newer versions of Windows. I have a machine with it set up, actually, as a researcher friend of mine inherited such a codebase. Here is an example set of instructions, not that I have read or vetted them (I don't remember what guide I had read to set it up).
https://itman.in/en/how-to-install-visualbasic-6-ide-on-wind...
I can run Visual Studio 6 just fine on Windows 10 - the only thing I needed to do was not install certain features and disable the old Java version install/check, and that's it. Windows is insane regarding backwards compatibility.
Microsoft's OS division has essentially committed to supporting VB6 apps forever. I imagine that RedHat and etc will do that with Python 2, too much of the world is running on it.
(VisualBasic, like Python was the most popular programming language of its day and found its way into a lot of niches which are not developer-centric.)
So it is like COBOL on a Mainframe? Too costly to convert into a Microcomputer modern language but cheap enough to run in COBOL.
I had no idea that VB 6.0 has so much support for it.
Python 4.0 is not coming out, the next release is 3.10
Do we really need "progress" in software that just werks?
Some people want Unicode support.
Somehow Ruby manages to support unicode without requiring .encode and .decode everywhere.