Unfortunely the only thing that didn't die with the strategy was the deep ingrained love for everything COM that the Windows team has, and they keep going at it without realising the rest of the world is done with COM, and we only endure it due to lack of alternatives in Windows APIs.

If they only had kept the way .NET Native and C++/CX exposed COM, but that would be too easy for their ways, and those tools are now gone.