Memes are funny because its a reference to a thing we both know and thus an inside joke elevated by that fact.

Modern ones are either that, or kind of just "heres a funny picture with text thats kind of funny next to this picture"

I blame Microsoft for that

And COBAL COBOL just won't die.

As backend code, yes. As a web (web, not api. As an api platform they're great) platform... No.
Asp.net and mvc were imo a disaster, silverlight was... Oof.
Then there is maui which could have done it using blazor but just... Didnt.
... And then there is blazor itself. Though blazor is imo the best of all the web platforms they had, and i like it, it still has very rough edges and is not gonna replace javascript any time soon.
Hell, microsoft cant even decently support their own web ui platform ( fluentui ) because their backbone ( webcomponents ) is completely broke ( or did v3 FINALLY release? ). There are other platforms but they all seem to not take full advantage of blazor and its disgusting.

While the language has improved over the years, I've personally never seen a PHP codebase that made me happy.

Or, if you spin it another way: you could've picked up the skills to develop for and support various frameworks, or get stuck in a rut for 30 years with just a single antiquated server-side language.

Oh my gosh if I could time travel and prevent generative AI from happening I would do it so fast. Although I do want to keep the academic and medical usage domains of AI. 🤔 HMM.

I was told in school that Java applets were the future and they made us take a class that focused heavily on them. I did make a few games in applets, but they were always janky and I am glad they are dead.