Comment by pjmlp

The language is actually relatively modern, it kept up with time (latest ISO version is from 2023), and there are even IDEs like Rocket Visual COBOL, granted not something that you might get on e.g. z/OS, but there are others.

It actually compiles to native code, it handles well its use case, batch processing business data, and despite everything less verbose than most agents markdown files I keep seeing.

Yes the risk is there, but it is also there for any kind of legacy application in enterprise scenarios, which is why most migrations fail.