COBOL never claimed to be "no code", but what it did claim was that it would significantly lower the level of training required to program. Which it absolutely did. Before compilers, you had to program in machine code which was extremely tedious and error prone and required a detailed understanding the microprocessor and computer architecture.

COBOL may seem clunky compared to modern languages, but the productivity improvement going from machine code to COBOL was likely larger than going from C++ to Python. COBOL have a bad reputation these days, but this is only because of how successful it was, leading it to still being used for mission-critical systems.