Grace Hopper is a legend not because the tools she invented are great by modern standards, but because she laid the groundwork. She was also one of the earliest to recognize how important computing was going to be and that hand-writing everything in hex was not a great idea. Later she championed even higher-level abstractions. Programming at the start of her career was considered non-creative secretarial work for women to do, which has the dubious distinction of being wrong and sexist at the same time.

When judged by standards of the day COBOL wasn’t bad. It was one of the first examples of a high-level language. People’s experiences with it (and large undocumented spaghetti logic programs) helped inform the next generation of languages.

Later our (ongoing) experiences with the unsafety of C led to Java, C#, and D among others. Further reactions to those are Swift and Rust.

I’d argue we wouldn’t have any of those languages in the same form without COBOL.