I’ve helped build significant portions (nearly all, technically speaking) of a few small US government services through contracts, so I’ll share my opinion although I realize US government agencies may be a bit different than those in the UK government.<p>In the US, tech you can deploy varies significantly agency to agency. In my case they were using a dated PHP CMS and we’d have to go through significant efforts and sign offs to get our own simple RDBMs in place on their services. Deploying to cloud infrastructure also was filled with red tape, especially for small applications. Internally they had little experience so forget just spinning up and hosting some AWS service. Then there’s costs, it’s not that such services might be too costly so to speak but money has color in the government and money to build the application is often a different color, maybe entirely different group, than those who will maintain it. So deployment/transfer for handoff is pretty much a nightmare, yet agencies often want (for good reason I’d say) full ownership of the application and surrounding infrastructure.<p>Stakeholders pop up from the agency your working with and any sort of collaborations between other agencies they’re trying to leverage, then if you have your own organization you end up with a superset of “idea makers” from a couple agencies and your own coming up with “wouldn’t it be nice” features from what otherwise should be a simple application.<p>Ultimately for deployment to arbitrary infrastructure and maintenance, SPAs simplify a lot if you absolutely need dynamic content and absolutely struggle to get real server side service infrastructure (eg most government organizations from my experience). So you pack as much complexity as you can into JS because it can somewhat take it, and you rely on user browsers to pickup the slack. This only goes so far of course, as there’s only so much you can do in an SPA that actually runs on a lot of devices but needs some real application functionality, so think small desktop applications, wizards, small computational models (a lot of what I do), etc.<p>So SPAs are the land I’ve been pushing in this space, no matter how much I loathe them in general, they’re one of the best fits for the constraints in these environments (which is why they get them a lot).