VB.NET is still a supported platform by microsoft, with the GUI builder and everything. We still use VB.NET exclusively at my current job, for better or for worse. With the addition of tools and libraries like DevExpress, its honestly not a bad setup.
I love the styling of this page. Everything is so consistent. Sometimes you'll see someone with a similar retro approach, but rarely do all the page elements follow the style this well.
To me, this is the real question. One of the purposes of the peer-review is to validate and verify results, which was clearly not done to a great extent here. Perhaps the reviewers were also using some type of AI?