As someone doing support and occasional code changes for a pile of vb6 that doesn't sound that bad. If you need a code base to be stable for decades COBOL beats vb6.
Yes it can, that's what I ended up writing at 4am this morning, lol. We manage way more instances then is feasible to do anything by hand. This is probably too late to help anyone, but you can also just stop instance, detach root, attach it to another instance, delete file(s), offline drive, detach, reattach to original instance, and then start instance. You need a "fixer" machine in the same AZ.