One can debate the details but in my opinion COM is fundamentally a great technology. Statically defined interfaces with extremely late bound, relatively large, opaque implementations. No inheritance. It's one of the only things that realises what Alan Kay was talking about when he talked about OOP (which is very different to what most people complain about). It's microservices and more and it works: It's still at the core of Windows and has served it well.

On the other hand, people working with .NET/SQL Server have been making a (great) living for 10 years.

Every company has its duds.