I watched a company almost go under(shrank to almost no employees) after exactly what you described. The BFEDs(including the CTO) refused to update their skills and the company tools/stack and the company was beaten out by competitors.
I worked at an organization that didn't let us use stored procedures or OOP because the older devs couldn't understand them (it was a Navy contractor, so there were guys that had been there 15+ years).
If you decide not to use a technology because the developers can't or are unwilling to learn them, you've got bigger problems than technology choices.
I'm at yet another place where every one does their own thing and once you get past 2 devs this quickly becomes an issue. But heaven forbid you want to set aside time for training and making sure everyone is on the same page with regards to skill and methods.
I'd say you also have a problem if one or two devs want to use a tech but aren't also willing to train the rest of the devs in them (passing around links to a few tutorials doesn't count as training).
Almost all of my "successes" in bringing people over to more modern practices centered around actual training. Meaning, creating sample apps and arguing effectively with upper management and the devs that I worked with daily.
For about 4 months I worked at a place where the senior dev's first question regarding any technology would be whether or not it could be done in VB6 (this was circa 2009 or so). If it could, he'd make the decision that it just had to be done in VB6 because that's what the shop was using at the time.
I realize you were just making a specific observation about one situation, but it's worth noting that being an "older" developer (which at 15+ years experience would be late 30s) in no universe means that the developer doesn't know things.
Indeed, the irony is that many shops full of junior FEDs found databases and stored procs so intimidating that we saw the rise of things like MongoDB. Even if it completely sabotages any medium or long term plan, if all you know is JavaScript and have very naive notions about the uses of data, seems great.
There were definitely "older" devs that wanted to do those things, but they didn't have the 15 years of tenure to be able to make those decisions. I should rephrase to say that if your devs don't want to learn new things, they probably aren't in the right field.
