It's often critical, just in a completely different field. The best explanation is simply the names - Common Business-Orientated Language vs Formula Translation.

So the Fortran equivalent of the current situation was NASA being desperate for Fortran programmers to patch Voyager a few years ago (which may have been overblown - my understanding is that they had the programmers, someone just took the "what's the problem?" and ran with it). Orbital models, weather models, stuff that's deep science put into code. COBOL is stuff where business logic is put into code.

They're both titans in their fields to this day - just different fields. At a very, very high level it’s essentially matlab vs excel.

I work at a place that writes new Fortran code today. Also c++, Python, Julia. Scientists will choose the least impedance mismatch to a library, some needed data set, or their brain.

To be sure. And I don't think that modern Fortran is overly obscure that you couldn't basically pick it up over a weekend from the language specification.

Every modern Linux distribution has a current gfortran bundled.

Modern Fortran is amazing. Force your company to move to Fortran 2008 and beyond. A good reference book is Modern Fortran Explained: Incorporating Fortran 2018.

are accurate weather forecasts not part of society's critical infrastructure?

They are but I'm saying that the code often isn't redundant in the same way a piece of infrastructure may be.