alt Hacker NewsClasses and metaclasses sound like architecture astronomy here. COM is fundamentally just a standard ABI and a way to look up DLL paths in the registry. There are more layers on top of that, but that's the basics and all you need for a plugin architecture.
That applies to SOM just as it does to COM.
Interesting to complain about one and then ignore exactly the same boilerplate for the other.
Leaving aside the fact that Microsoft's tooling for COM has already had multiple reboots between VB OCX, MFC, .NET Framework RCW/CCW, .NET ComWrappers, ATL, WRL, WIL, WinRT, each one with its share of astronomy.
No one uses the bare bones vtbl and nothing else.