I think it’s an analogy and a metaphor. I don’t personally use it and I don’t strongly object to it.
Edit: I just read the “…in the weather model field” part, my eyes/brain skipped it on the first read. I would definitely disagree with that analogy. Perhaps the analogy works, and I wouldn’t object to it, for the Fortran ecosystem and applications as a whole. But strictly for the weather, ocean, and climate models (number crunching), it’s a definite no, at least for the next 10 years or so. We’ll see how the ML research and applications progress–it’s possible that they will replace the deterministic models entirely in operations, and the deterministic model may become more limited to research over prediction.
Second edit: I should also be clear that in the above paragraph I mean it specifically for the number-crunching parts of the weather modeling. Post-processing, analysis, and delivery of data has mostly moved to other languages. And there are new applications (e.g. ML) that are emerging and not being written in Fortran. So the overall Fortran share is possibly not shrinking in the absolute sense, but rapidly shrinking in the relative sense.