They're sort of heading in this direction with VSCode. I can imagine that VS itself is a non-portable COM-infested disaster area.

COM is good and it is anything except disaster. It its raw form, COM is just a small and natural abstraction over plain C interface.

Just like a C interface is a small and nice abstraction over plain registers/stack call models of the past.

The advent of calling conventions like C was a huge step forward in 1970s. Before that, there was a mad zoo of passing parameters via random CPU registers and praying that you made no mistake and it would work without a crash.

COM is no different. IUnknown is just 3 methods (QueryInterface, AddRef, RemoveRef) over a plain C. It immediately brings an ability to use service model design in APIs.

COM is anything but disaster. It's a really nice language-independent component framework. An ABI and marshalling standard, built upon ANOTHER, older, standard -- DCE RPC -- that allows e.g., C++ COM server to talk with Powershell, no extra effort required.

As opposed to what you (do not) have on Linux: generating bindings for each scripting language you might want to support, and no standardized way of doing IPC/RPC.

COM is great. VS Code is an Electron disaster. (actually, it's the only Electron app I don't dread using, so they've been doing something right)

Same with document formats: MS Office Open XML instead of just supporting the existing OpenDocument Format (ODF) as open standard.

That is not really related to Linux itself, more to the open source / free software world.