COM is only one facet of the issue; the real problem here is that "Visual Basic" no longer exists as a language. VB.NET should have been called B#, but since Microsoft has a lock on the Visual Basic name, they can apply it to anything (even a toaster, which, come to think of it, would be more appropriate).
Prior to .NOT, VB programmers had the option of whether to use OOP or procedural; now they do not. The .NOT framework is really an OOP framework, designed by C++ programmers which does no justice to the language previously known as VB.
It isn't just that COM (may be) dead, and whether we like that or not, it is that Microsoft has decided that all our accumulated knowledge is now null and void, and all the time and costs we have already incurred in bug-proofing must be entirely re-done, etc.
So the bus may have left, but here we are 3 years into .NOT and I have seen only a very small handful of shrink wrapped apps which run on it. Guess I'm not the only holdout...