I will repeat Hans Passant's comment, because I think he gives an accurate answer to my question:
This is a driver implementation detail. There are many possible serial port drivers around, they often get emulated by a USB or BlueTooth device driver. Often of questionable quality. The standard Microsoft driver already says no, it forces the IRP.IOStatus.Information field to 0 when the IRP gets cancelled. Don't cancel I/O if you cannot afford data loss.