You could say the same about COBOL. Just because it's "dead" doesn't mean that businesses don't have tens to hundreds of thousands to even millions of lines of code hanging around in these "dead" languages.

While it may not be exciting work, not every programmer is looking to do the latest and greatest thing that will appear at the top of HN. They make good money because the business knows paying someone well to maintain it is better that paying a team to rewrite it. That's why one of the issues with COBAL programmers is retiring and passing on, not leaving to go to a NodeJS shop.

Yes, and if they'd said Rust was more popular than COBOL, that would also have been damning with faint praise.