I worked for a company in the late 1980s that started developing with a 4GL product (Dataflex) instead of COBOL. The article is right that COBOL has outlasted most (all?) of those 4GL solutions.

Looking back, COBOL would have been a better technical choice back then. Dataflex's metadata-based dynamic UI and report generation saved some simple, repetitive work, but much more effort was wasted working around its limitations.