> Like I realize some of it is modern C++ and maybe Microsoft was not focusing on desktop when C++ had these innovations

This is basically it, I think; COM and HANDLEs predate working standardised C++ compilers. MFC provides higher-level abstractions. Then everyone got distracted by managed runtimes. Finally C++ has a mostly-sane framework for universal usage of smart pointers, so this is bringing them back to the old Win32 era.

Unfortunately we can't get rid of wstring, but we can provide yet another layer of wrappers for it.