I visited the visa webs tie the article complained about. It was not very beautifully designed, but not especially awful either. This feels like one of those periodic Economist articles where the author vents about some personal grievance to fill up column inches during a slow news week.
It was a functional website that I could navigate easily!
I guess the “problem” was it didn’t use bootstrap icons
The one big issue with Indian Government websites is that there is no single unified visual language, something that UX4G [1] is aiming to fix.
Other than that, I agree; this reads like the rantings of an young intern incapable of operating anything not built using whitespace-heavy "flat" interfaces.
[1] https://www.ux4g.gov.in/