Not a great headline really, C is nearly 50, but most people wouldn't consider it a disaster for everything to be written in C. The problem isn't that COBOL is old, it's that it's largely obsolete.
I agree with your point though.
every major RBMS is c or c++.
you don't write frontend's with c/c++ but if you're interacting with a datastore most are c.
the problem with c and c++'s age are legacy behaviors related to them we've since determined are not beneficial to actual programs and make reasoning about them harder.
When you are developing software, you just want that stuff to work. You don't want to have to dig around in the internals to figure things out.
That's why scripting languages have become so popular.