YIP I trained early 80's in JSP, didn't even learn GOTO was a verb, as could code around using it with JSP.

Then you hit reality and all the baggage legacy code has as well as standard, JSP did not traction well and when it did - well maintenance of code......lots of legacy spagetti out there.

WHy is COBOL still in use, its a robust data processing language and that is the bulklk of things - batches of data that need processing, mailing lists for the post, bills.

COBOL does handle data well if you want to know when it rounds/how it rounds and have and trancation....Formating ourput. This was at a time that no other could fit the job and all runs upon robust hardware designed not to fail as much as your consumer affairs that were still a glint in many eyes.

So the legacy grew, bloated. I've worked on a fair few migratioin projects for a software house and the costs to migrate you large blob of legacy code on legacy hardware to run upon something modern is not a quick process, not cheap and so much planning and due dilligence as well as data integretary and testing involved alone is a huge costs.

SO you end up with legacy code hanging in there as no managment team can justify a 6-10 year budget in the mindsets that work upon a 5 year plan and budget.

WHich ends up with many systems being literally too big to fail and too costly to ever be full migrated as the risk/costs just grow and management with the guil and drive to push against the status quo in management is often a path to career suicide, so they carry on with the heard mentality that management prevail. With those that do stick their neck out being of two types, those who care and know what's needed and those who just want to be seen to be doing something big, run into it, then the rush decisions unfold and before you know it, they have already flown off to another company saying how they initiated a project that will die a horrible death not long after they left as people realised what a mess and the true costs involved are.

Hence many reasons why COBOL still around today, it just works and in some ways you can't knock legacy. Nokia phones, work for days, just work and do the job of being a phone. So for that task they do the job much better than anything modern, however the modern android and iphones do much more, bells and whistles of all flavours and yet if you just want to, or need to make a call, overall they are not as robust compared to using an old nokia, that just works and works well for the task at hand.

This and the mentality, if it works, don't change it does have merit and is something you learn over time.

But there is always hope, so bits can be pulled away from the legacy and if planned and managed right by people who know what is needed and the business needs as well as requirements and mindful of minimising risk and interruption, there will always be a way.

Though I've seen many a project with the best in the world be doomed from the start as the bites of the cake made it an all or nothing approach and nobody wants to wait or budget/plan for something that takes longer than 5 years in software in the business customer world. ALways exceptions, but then many are planned for 5 years when known will take longer on the basis that 3 years in you push a new 5 year plan out and bolt on a few trinket features and justification to hide the fact that it was never going to go fluid and end up on target.

Best approach, bit by bit, batch processing and the like can be more easily migrated, though the data as always and interacting with that will always be as big a part of any migration than the code.

But yeah GOTO, when your working on code that needs performance and the platform is more costly to upgrade than most, you will see much use of GOTO in the code.
Then you get wonderful things like variable length records that many won't even know about and unaware that in COBOL you can define a say a top level record definition as 80 character and then redefine that with a PIC(x) OCCURS DEPENDING UPON VARIABLENAME. Then write that feild and get variable length records stored and save data storage and other expensive resources that we take for granted today.
So yes, many gotchas and creativity to eek out performance and reduce storage costs.

WIth that, GOTO is not your biggest problem with legacy code of the COBOL flavour, let alone linked in machine code specially crafted to do a sort upon the data as was faster and now nobody knows what that blob actually does or how to change it, so yeah, lots of traps in any legacy code of any flavour.