As someone who has worked on migration project from redhat 6 to redhat 7, I strongly disagree.

The article speculates that the hardware is “no more” than 16 years old. Obsolete, but newer than the original code, meaning that it not that strongly tied to the hardware.

COBOL can and does run on x86 Linux. I suppose you could probably even put it in a container.

It can, but do you really believe is this what those apps are working on, or even that they could work without major rewrite? They are strongly tied to their mainframe environments.

From Big Blue itself, COBOL on a Kubernetes cluster!

https://github.com/IBM/kubernetes-cobol

That fantastic and terrifying at the same time. The complexity of Kubernetes and when you open the container: Bam, Cobol.