According to the TIOBE Index, C (1972) is the most popular programming language in April 2021 (followed by Java, Python, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript and, uh, Assembly Language. Fortran was at #20.)
So COBOL is in good company. ;-)
As you very rightly pointed out, no one ever goes, "The networking stack in your smartphone is written in C, a nearly 50 year old programming language" but governments underfund their IT infrastructure and then go, "Welp, nothing we could do, COBOL is sooooo old."
The amount of mismanagement that gets deflected away by pointing at COBOL and tapping into the largely justified distaste the development community has for COBOL is a real convenient out for the people responsible for that mismanagement.
This matters, because with C I can connect my existing C software to a web server, which lets me tie ancient software into the modern infrastructure. I suspect that's harder to do with COBOL...
Latest Cobol revision is from 2014 and you even have Visual Cobol, https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/featu...
What's really interesting to me is that SQL and ML were created in 1973 and 1974 respectively. And yes, those languages have evolved over time, and yes, they have some warts and telltale signs of age... but overall they still are considered very high level languages, and are still incredibly popular in their own right.
For a recent project, I chose F# (an ML descendant) and SQL, not because I had to integrate with legacy software written in those languages, but because they're still great languages.
It was always designed for business type applications.
Back in the 1960s assembly language was used for writing the missile defense systems and other systems programming [later C and Ada, etc became prevalent].