I'm sure a lot of countries in EU did this. First hand I know, they did this in Croatia as I was one of the developer who had to use it to deploy on it.
The worst thing I have ever seen in my life. And I worked on a lot legacy apps written in VB.NET, Web forms, old Sharepoint, Basic and even when the whole app was one big mess of store procedures.
AWS, Azure, GC are at least written with thought about end users (us, developers) while government cloud was architectured, designed and built by the lowest bidder whose first goal was to cut and cut and cut his costs whenever possible.
In my country (Croatia), post WW2 schools in rural areas were one man band. You had professor / teacher and he was in charge about anything and everything in the school.
Also, note that some (if not majority) of kids were malnourished, so an older child could look like "properly developed" much younger kid.
Those schools existed for two reasons:
a) to teach kids how to read and write and some very basic math
b) find ones with potential and connect them with benefactor to sponsor theirs more advanced education
Just to add to this - I'm from Zagreb (Capital of Croatia, former Yugoslavia republic) - we literally have nudist beach a mile or two from strict center of the city (https://tourist.hr/place/nudist-beach-jarun).
When you are working as backend developer and your clients are mobile devices, is your message 8 times smaller or bigger is difference between up-and-running and outage.
AWS, Azure, GC are at least written with thought about end users (us, developers) while government cloud was architectured, designed and built by the lowest bidder whose first goal was to cut and cut and cut his costs whenever possible.