This is not atypical for US government projects. In 2012 I was brought in to “rescue” the UI for a huge multi-contractor system that was supposed to replace an aging legacy system written 40+ years ago.
I worked with the architect tirelessly for almost 3 years, trying to implement various changes but at its core the new system was highly flawed and suffered from various team changes and reboots. The UI/UX “expert” was not a developer and had very little technical background, and was therefore unfamiliar with basic HTML and CSS concepts. For some reason they let end-users dictate style and behavior aspects of the application. For example, the legacy system consisted of green-screen terminals and all the associated keystrokes (think ancient POS systems you still see in some retail stores). The vocal minority of these end-users demanded that we replicate this interface exactly instead of building it from the ground up as a modern best-practices UI using the latest web idioms and paradigms.
It gets worse. At some point someone important said Javascript is evil, and we were to avoid using it as much as possible, despite the application using several embedded and third-party Javascript libraries.
I ended up leaving that project for a slightly less insane one, but the pay was good. Anyway, I heard about a year later that the entire project (a 10-year effort that cost tens of millions of dollars) was abandoned. They continued using their greenscreens but I heard they hired a company to build an interface that reads these screens and presents a modern HTML facade over there screens that operates them kinda like a proxy.
You can’t make this stuff up.