Yeah it's hard to say but I believe there's at least some truth to that. I took COBOL off my resume over a decade ago just to combat the volume of recruiters trying to drag me away from the cloud back to on-prem land.

A good friend of mine who worked on a CICS based credit card processing application at that bank doubled his salary twice inside of 4 yrs. First by quitting the bank and going to a boutique consultancy to build competing software (which they sold to other banks) and then by quitting that job and coming back to the bank to takeover the abysmal state the CICS app had lapsed into in his absence.

And that was circa 2010.

One thing that was true of the bank then and I'm sure is true now is that when they see a nail they truly have just the one hammer. When a problem comes along, hit it with a huge sack of cash until it goes away.

I don't think "know COBOL" is enough. I'm pretty sure I can learn COBOL in a week. It's more about "know COBOL and know all this old stuff like CLIs, etc, and know all these old approaches".

Typically it's not just about knowing COBOL as a language, the bottleneck is having real expertise wrt. highly specific, fiddly proprietary frameworks that are implemented on top of COBOL.

Not sure if this is still the case, but Dillard's (US retailer) had a COBOL training program for undergrads as recently as six years ago

Amazing to know AI has eliminated this role that used to have blank cheque.