You laugh, but depending on the actual Cobol support (e.g. whether it also supports a decent amount of CICS) it could make it easy to port a bunch of functions that are locked away on zOS.

I was actually serious.

That might be really smart. Cobol is still in wide use, and somebody needs to replace the aging Cobol community. I bet salaries will sky rocket

They already have. You're entering a market, as you say, where every contemporary is a super senior developer, for old, rich companies like banks, and with demand staying static...but supply dropping.

I've read this multiple times, and I'm sure it's an intuive argument. Is it actually true though?

Yep, I am aware of projects currently looking for COBOL devs in Germany.

I am aware of projects which look for developer using any language. That doesn't make COBOL special though ^^