I’ve always gone back and forth on the /s honestly. Sometimes, depending on the writer’s style it’s really easy to pick up in text but some text really needs the extra cues you’d get from facial expression and speaking tone to get it. It also depends on the receiver and the context of the conversation. My feeling is it’s here to stay.
Did the person even respond specifically what the question was about? I assume they re-wrote the program because they couldn’t be bothered to explain a complicated exception.
I don’t envy you from the past - VBA is difficult to write in a way that is both clean, easy to debug, and easy to maintain. We have some legacy VBA apps deployed at customers that just won’t die.