[miffy900]

> why Microsft has ceased anything beyond legacy support for it

That is not true at all. DirextX is COM, UWP was COM based, WinRT is still COM, WinUI and the Windows App SDK is again based on COM. C++, C#, Python and Rust are all supported programming languages for the Windows App SDK thanks to - you guessed it: COM. The C++, C# and Rust language projections for it are still being constantly updated: https://github.com/microsoft/xlang

When they started Project Reunion (code name for Windows APP SDK) back in 2021, just before Windows 11's release, they decided to double-down on COM. Like hard.

https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/blob/main/docs/fa...

> Practically speaking, any language & runtime that can handle COM objects can support Windows App SDK

[twoodfin]

And, I believe, the entire .NET CLR infrastructure is essentially an extension of COM technologies.

[jiggawatts]

Not really. You can use and author COM components in .NET, but most developers use the platform more like Java.