> I could tell you about all my accomplishments over three decades, such as replacing the use of a System/3 punch card system with the AS/400, writing a Cobol debugger, or…. Ah, I’m boring you. What you do care about are things I did in the last two years.
RPG is only relevant today in the same way Cobol is.
That's actually his point.
Someone who has seen a technology mature and develop over decades, seen the hype trains come and go, projects succeed and fail, might be a bit wiser than someone fresh out of Stanford. He might have some ideas about how to build maintainable systems after working on some that are older than most developers.
If you don't see it, that's on you, not on the author for mentioning his particular "archaic" specialization.
If the friend mentioned lost or left his current job, he'd probably (?) struggle to find another. It wouldn't be nasty ageism, it'd be "sorry all your experience is with a technology irrelevant to us; that we haven't even heard of".
I say this going on the article alone - of course, for all I know the guy's an avid Ruby/Node/Elixir/whatever's-hot user for a range of awesome side-projects.