They’re not just going to hand them out to anyone who asks for one.

I’m sure there are some prerequisites, similar to how the acp is managed.

Absolutely. Saying this as someone who codes 100% in VB supporting applications that are 25+ years old.

Honestly, I couldn't be happier with the language strategy as I was wholly expecting VB to be discontinued.

.NET itself is about 20 years old. How are you supporting VB apps that are 25+?

I don't see the contradiction. Visual Basic existed before .NET did.

Visual Basic is more than 40 years old. The .Net version of the language was released somewhere around 2002, if I recall correctly.

They probably migrated some VB6 apps to VB.NET.