I think I figured it out. My core Space Age is 2.0.32 whereas VC:PC required a version of VC which did not show on the in-game mod portal (due to me not having updated to 2.0.41 just yet (afraid of incompatibilities)).
I was able to discover this because I manually downloaded VC:PC from the internet mod portal, which then demanded the updated VC, which itself could not be activated due to 2.0.41 core not yet being installed.
I've had similar experiences with core versions (I had to go through all the versions from 0.16 to more current versions), but never saw the error message of "There is no compatible version of [mod] on the mod portal." I wonder if that's a new error message that just started last week(?).