There are huge incentives to talk up a shortage in X because the labor market self trains. So, no we’ve never had a nursing shortage etc, but talking about it is a great way to save some money.
The only signal worth paying attention to is industry salary trends, but reporters rarely have the time or incentives to actually do real reporting.
The thing is - the bank referenced in the story has COBOL programmers, but they kept recalling the effective COBOL programmer.
That's the issue with self-training for mission critical systems. Sure, some people can self-train, but a company doesn't want to pay people to learn on the job, while thwey are counting the beans.
Socialize the losses/costs (publicly-funded school), privatize the gains/profits.
That said, there's a different side to the issue, which is that smaller companies do not (and never did) have the resources to train people. There definitely is a shortage of senior management-capable technical people who can lead projects and teams at smaller organizations. This however isn't relevant to big banks and Cobol.