Recently I had a look at some COBOL out of curiosity, and as someone used to modern languages it appeared very verbose and awkward - far less complex conceptually, but the syntax itself is not at all lightweight.

It seemed to be more or less as expected - fairly straightforward and apparently easy to learn, but unattractively bureaucratic.

My understanding is that you don't get paid the top money for knowing the language but for being able to understand and maintain/revise the kinds of systems it operates - which is a whole other level of skill and experience, and not something you can just pick up in a few evenings of side projects.