I can't find a way to construe that that doesn't make it a bad analogy.

1. Higher level languages -- COBOL being one of the first -- do pretty darned similar things in pretty darned similar ways, much of the time. [Inevitable caveats.] The major break was not between COBOL and anything more recent. It's between assembler/machine language and any higher level language.

2. Higher level languages allow you to do more in less time because you're offloading part of the fiddly nuisance management to the machine. But programming in a higher-level language does not require more knowledge of how the machine works. It requires less. Very substantially less.

3. Since we haven't been training many COBOL programmers, and since a great deal of expensive financial programming was done in COBOL on expensive mainframes intended to last a long time, COBOL programmers who can maintain the old stuff make good money.

Programmers have passionate likes and dislikes for systems we consider well-designed for their intended purposes, or badly designed. But we don't tend to sneer at old tech simply because it old. Particularly we don't usually sneer at the people who knew how to get useful work out of much less accommodating tech.