Wow, I didn't realise. I haven't paid attention to Windows APIs for a long time. I really thought it would have died a long time ago.
After WinDev managed to botch Longhorn efforts, its .NET ideas were redone in COM for Vista, and it has been like that ever since.
WinRT/UAP/UWP, is basically COM with a new base interface IInspectable, .NET metadata instead of TLB files, and app boxing.
And it is the foundation of WinAppSDK, whose goal is to port UWP subsystem into plain Win32, although their current execution leaves a lot to be desired.
As pjmlp mentioned, this part was very successful and all new Windows APIs are based on it.
The COM which failed and which you are thinking about was related to OLE and the idea of embedding Excel sheets inside Photoshop drawings, ...
that's still a thing isn't it?
On Windows it works both ways with OLE 2.