We had a brigade of COBOL programmers SWOOP in during 1999 at Schering-Plough, the pharmaceutical company I worked for at that time.
We had in-house programmers because we were still heavily reliant on IBM COBOL mainframe code from the 80s/90s but this required fine-toothed comb expert work.
And it was expensive. It took many months. If they didn’t do it, all kinds of business operations would have been scrambled up. But it was a success.
The reason why COBOL still hangs around:
It’s written in business logic.
That is, business and legal processes and procedures all are PERFECTLY mirrored by COBOL such that you can take COBOL code and EXTRACT business logic from it – a kind that you could then use to train employees using paper and all of the functionality would remain.
So, the code gets complex just as business logic is complex and there’s no other languages that duplicate it in quite the same way.
But that said, there’s no need for active development because our way of thinking has changed long ago whereby computer programming did not have to correspond to business logic. It was nice thinking at the time; “let’s make plain english programming that even middle managers can write code in”.
But for decades, we’ve instead had IT as a distinct department from business.
(Unless you meant: “a big event blown out of proportion that amounted to nothing”. I attribute it to the folks that came in and scoured through code being successful at the task. I mean if you do your job well, it looks as if you did nothing at all)