I hear lots of interpretations of it. I could be misremembering. I'll take another look at it. Appreciate the specific points to look into. :)

"Second: I would suspect that there are far more new projects started today in C than there are in COBOL. C is in use (at least sometimes) as a voluntary choice, and COBOL is not."

If we're using that constraint, then Java and PHP are the example with Java for about any kind of app. A lot of people even like Java. They think it's great and hate C. So on and so forth. Yet, the popularity still tells me nothing as I got to watch Java get forced by Sun and others into its position step-by-step with insane amounts of work to get it to match performance and productivity of better-designed languages... partly successful there. It was actually experience of Java IIRC (later C#) that was the reason many people didn't think an OS could be done in a GC'd language. They mentally associated GC'd language with stuff like that. That a small team pulled it off in Oberon with a handful of people at a time porting or extending it is always news to Java developers I meet here.

Lack of context, bad design, meant to replace prior languages for most applications, platform orientation, and massive ecosystem + uptake + tooling make it a better comparison. So, I'll use it and COBOL next time.