We might have been better off that way. FORTRAN does have its downsides, but language churn itself has downsides that almost always outweigh the assumed upsides of a better language.
If we had just stuck with FORTRAN forever, how many problems would have been completely avoided!? There’d be better, and more, IDEs, since even if the language is hard to parse, it’s still just one parser that needs all the effort. So many unfortunate problems in education caused by language and ecosystem churn would have been avoided (the infamous “by the time you graduate, it’s always outdated” problem).
The only problem is that FORTRAN is too new. Should’ve stuck with the Hollerith tabulator.