Organizations like that have no code hygiene. They have smart talented people that are entrenched in their way of doing things. They don't have the money to throw the code away and start over. They don't have the control to enforce code standards. There are a couple of terrible effects that slow them down.
I'll bet you a nickel that the json is generated by a stored procedure. In that kind of environment, you can't really run a local version of the system. if you're lucky there's a prod, qa, and development version. the development version is shared by everybody.
What winds up happening is the dev system has lots of in-progress stuff, and i can't release my stuff till the other in-progress stuff is ready to go, or is rolled back.
Also high priority stuff tends to go to "that one wizard guy". Unfortunately that one wizard guy is backed up with 6 months of other projects, cause he's the wizard.
Is it "right"? no, of course not. These systems evolve from people making good decisions in the moment, that don't really take into account the global state of the system.
Finally, every few years a new CIO comes into power and wants to clean things up. a few new folks buy in, but the older entrenched interests just pay lip service, because they know the only way to actually get software out the door is to do it their way. (They tried and were burned by at least one of the prior CIO approaches)
I think those organizations are pretty screwed. they are incapable of change at the layer they need. Banks, schools, airlines, machine shops, anyplace there's a large sized in house dev team (30+), that team is going to very likely kind of suck. There are exceptions, but generally, it's a rough state.
So, yes, i agree, but actually solving that problem in a way that won't kill the business is incredibly hard.