I actually think COM is an amazing bit of engineering considering its intended use case.

It still feels like a much more advanced way of sharing compiled libraries between different languages than the current default of "export a C ABI and communicate across the barrier via primitive sticks and stones."

COM isn't perfect but I still find it impressive especially since COM/OLE are 40 years old at this point.

It basically is that. It's a standardized sticks and stones. Plus objects for some reason. But I don't think the objects are a bad thing - it allows multiple implementations of sometimes to co-exist - consider using two different GPUs from different vendors at the same time. It took a really long time to make OpenGL support that, but DirectX could always do it (at least at the API level) by just creating two different ID3DDevice objects backed by different code from different DLLs both loaded at the same time.