My impression is that the design was a bit more nuanced. COBOL's design allows a "business person" to read a program and get a sense of what it does. The user personas for "business persons" are roughly commissioned military officers. A non-comm hands the lieutenant the source. The lieutenant hands the source to the colonel managing the program. And an admiral at codeworks inspection can riffle a deck of cards and find something that could be done better. All that verbosity and rigidity is for reading code.

Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute. SICP.