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Ready to be corrected, as I haven't worked with DOS or Windows for decades, but I seem to recall ".com" is merely used for familiarity/compatibility and hasn't meant anything about the underlying format for a very long time now.

The Wikipedia page for .com suggests that 64 bit Windows NT+ systems can't run the original style .com files anymore due to lacking the MS-DOS emulation subsystem, so the point may be moot.

Already thirty years ago there were DOS executables with a .COM extension that weren't actually in the COM format. COMMAND.COM in later versions of DOS is an example.

I think you are right.

Totally cheating would be to integrate the DOS application functionally into the Windows DOS stub. Instead of printing "This application requires Microsoft Windows" it could even use overlays to circumvent the 64kB com restriction.

The limit for a .COM's useful payload is 64KiB, but that wouldn't necessarily prevent the actual file from being bigger, with either truncate or wrapover semantics.