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.
You could also use forward slashes, like C:/path/subpath, which has worked since Windows 1.0/DOS 2.0.
That's handy when you're entering paths in a Cygwin/MSYS Bash shell, but might not help much if you're trying to parse or otherwise work with existing patgh variables composed with backslashes.
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.