"Old" and "traditional" are not interchangeable.

Many of the Child Ballads are not necessarily traditional folk songs - they are old texts. Many have never been found sung in the tradition, and many have no known tune. They had effectively died out - rejected by the "folk".

As songs they are a product of the revival of the 1950s and 60s, and have no more right to be judged traditional than anything written by Dylan, the Beatles or Leonard Cohen