[BearfootCoder]

There's a good discussion of this at https://medium.com/the-technical-archaeologist/is-cobol-hold....

It starts off by suggesting that it's all about how COBOL's superiority stems from having support for Binary Code Decimal as a language-level element, rather than having to be imported via a library (the overhead of which really starts to matter at the volume of transactions which COBOL is typically required to handle). But then broadens the discussion out to argue that the intrinsic shape of the COBOL environment "stack allocation, pointers, unions with no run-time cost of conversion between types, and no run-time dispatching or type inference" is fundamentally different from languages like Java or C#, and those differences provide provide performance benefits which cannot be easily obtained in those other languages.