Yes you can write bugs in any paradigm, but some designs are just empirically worse than others when it comes to helping people write correct code.
IUnknown is a classic case of something that looks simple but in fact a correct implementation is not at all trivial, yet COM developers were expected to get it right by hand again and again. COM itself didn't help with it at all, so the ecosystem was very dependent on IDE generated code and (eventually) ATL and other standard libraries.
None of the things you highlight were good ideas, in my view, although probably the best you can do in C.
IUnknown is a classic case of something that looks simple but in fact a correct implementation is not at all trivial, yet COM developers were expected to get it right by hand again and again. COM itself didn't help with it at all, so the ecosystem was very dependent on IDE generated code and (eventually) ATL and other standard libraries.
None of the things you highlight were good ideas, in my view, although probably the best you can do in C.