It was kind of fun watching adult men say the word "ActiveX" out loud and in earnest though. DCOM with Apartment Threading just didn't have that same "Power Rangers Bad Guy" energy.

From a security perspective, ActiveX is a relic from days long past, when people could be reasonably trusted - an assumption that broke around the early '00s when "dialer" malware offered a first way to extract funds from victims.

From a developer perspective, I'm still sad that it went away. The old COM/OLE/ActiveX ecosystem was flexible to a degree nothing has never ever been since.