Fortunately for me, I am retired now. I do have clients that still rely on me, and so I still rely on the old tools. I design for hardware other than Intel or the ARMs. I have circuit analysis tools, a fleet of programmer/debuggers, circuit board layout tools, and so on. I just can't afford to keep it up to date, nor was that necessary ... until Microbloat stuck me in the ass.
It seems the entire world has forgotten that programming to the bare metal and designing electronics and circuit boards is still required, even if the thundering herd can merely write for web pages or kit computers.
What are the apps? Can you share details? Are you sure it’s not the missing VB6 common controls DLLs (easily fixed with a download)?
I am an EE, by the way, and I routinely work on a very large system that has been optimized down to the “bare metal”, SIMD instructions, analysis for cache impact, etc. Lots of software at Microsoft is that way. For example, there was a team at MS that re-ordered fields in C structures within SQL Server to maximize what would fit in an x86 cache line. I’m working on hardware acceleration of data center apps currently. So the “whole world” hasn’t forgotten - just less people worried about that sort of thing as the hardware is so much more powerful. Only a very small number of companies have people developing software at that level - and the OS makers are one example.
BTW, there are many many PCB design packages written in this century and compatible with Windows 10. I know you’re retired, so it may not be practical to replace that aging copy of PCAD with Altium Designer, but just pointing out that you’re a bit of an exception.