I like the part of the quote you omitted:

“We have to maintain programmers who are experts in the programming languages of the '90s in order to keep running our current system, so we have a technical debt that stretches back many decades,” Tumlin told San Francisco’s KQED in February 2023.

They say that as if most of the most popular languages in the '90s aren’t still in common use today. I guess what he really means is that they managed to pick something that was obscure proprietary garbage even back then, and should’ve known better.