I think there’s something to that but there’s also a lot of selectivity there. Many of the same people who complained about COBOL because it was verbose adopted things like enterprise Java, so there’s more than a suggestion that this might be a less than completely objective assessment.

The bigger problem: COBOL was an open standard but none of the implementations were open source for ages (I haven’t looked at GNU COBOL in years, but I think this is no longer the case) so nobody was building new things or experience when they had to pay to get started.