Most of those cobol programs are doing something equivalent to a single SQL query.

And Cobol programs are _verbose_. Have a look at the examples on Rosetta code. C# (which isn't particularly concise) can do in 40 lines what Cobol needs 250+

Where we (modern programmers) would write a program with a large number of modules and imports, most Cobol programmers probably wouldn't. There is a lot of copying-and-pasting going on there.

That's an average program length of 3000 lines. Imagine your code base consisted of 112,500 files, each of about 500 lines (including HTML, CSS, SQL statements and "real" program code).

That's about what it is equivalent to.

Plugging that equivalent number into a Cocomo calculator, it says "20 years of 800+ programmers".