Nah, the experiences are extremely different. Old-school GUI's with files locked up in mainframes vs Netbeans with tons of middleware, ANT, etc. Java has all these frameworks, model-driven development with UML, and so on. COBOL is probably strict waterfall with Java shops taking on forms of agile. Huge differences even if I see some superficial similarities.

What they have in common, as with C, is they were pulled or pushed in for ecosystem benefits + marketing then spread and sustained on that bases mostly. So much stuff written in them with so many talent or tools that they're self-perpetuating. I'm claiming most C adoption & entrenchment is the same phenomenon outside embedded or ultra-high-performance applications where use is quite practical. You constrained the COBOL example but I recalled popularity effect applied to Java, too.