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WinUI 3 is planned to have support for "Win32 app model" apps. I'm not sure if this is strictly "CoreWindow" or another class with different features, but you'll be able to write "native" UWP-Style apps in C++ and deploy them as an unrestricted .exe. They're going to show a demo at Build 2020, I heard.

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My understanding is the WinUI 3 Win32 model is still going to be basically doing what you can already do with XAML Islands, just packaged more nicely with wrapper classes and Visual Studio templates and so on, so by itself it doesn't change the underlying HWND vs. CoreWindow situation (just wraps it). There are already Win32 apps, like Windows Terminal, that implement a "UWP" UI by doing their entire UI in one big XAML Island.

Rust/WinRT has really triggered my interest. For someone who hasn't been following Windows development for more than almost two decades, what's a good read to understand the different models of app creation and distribution?

Unfortunately it's a bit of a mess right now for reasons alkonaut mentioned in his post upthread. The official Microsoft doc page -> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/ is maybe an ok starting point for someone with a vague memory of Windows desktop development who's curious about what's new, but I could see someone getting lost in a maze of acronyms and links, especially if you're trying to use it with a newly semi-supported language like Rust

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