I've checked in America before and came to the same conclusion. There's an idea that COBOL programming pays vastly more than other languages, but it's just a myth. It might pay a little more, but more like 20% more. Certainly not enough to warrant a COBOL career.
And I'm sure some consultants can earn vast sums fixing old COBOL code, but that's just because they're consultants. Consultants always earn vast sums.
I don't understand why people are claiming this sets your career to only ever write COBOL. I know plenty of people who started their careers with perl, but have been Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, or Rust programmers at different points as their careers progressed.
Someone overseeing a project migrating a COBOL monolith over time to a set of decoupled services in some other language would easily have a strong story for the timeless need of improving application architecture.
