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The article gets it: the problem isn't COBOL, the problem is lack of maintenance. The analogy is apt, too: if you never put oil in a car & it fails, the problem is not how the car the built.
There are materials for learning COBOL. Here are some materials from the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe project:
https://www.openmainframeproject.org/projects/coboltrainingc...
And when there was a call last year for COBOL programmers to help some of these aging systems, a lot of people immediately popped up: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-linux-foundation-se...
While COBOL has its quirks, it's not that hard to learn. It even has some advantages, for example, it has built-in support for fixed-point decimal arithmetic.
In general, COBOL is the scapegoat, not the actual problem.
It depends on team culture at a time.
There are teams which require all changes come via defined channel (like bug tracker or special email), and which put ticket # in each commit (like Gitlab -- see the "closes #..." at the commit message [0])
But many teams have no procedure, or the procedure is optional -- and there you can easily get "made update" commits.