Our team is very careful at choosing technology that is stable and well proven. In fact, it took a lot of debate for us to move from Rails static pages to React SPA.
As for government being slow and only change once a decade, you might be underestimating engineers in the government.
The team I worked with managed to pull off React/Node.js/Redis/Zookeeper microservice framework over AWS using Jenkins as CI/CD pipeline. And most of the team came from an older enterprise stack using Java and IBM WebSphere. They were able to adapt to the new framework.
Be conservative, yes. But being overly conservative is part of the reasons why government is so far behind today.
Interesting, when I said once a decade I didn't particulary mean changing anything I meant that the system as a whole has to last a decade.
I've stuff in production I wrote in 2007, it's the same system but lots of the parts have been replaced (bit of a Theseus/Triggers Broom philosophical point) over time.
I agree on the overly conservative point, what I find helps there is to consider the migration away from anything new you are considering, I usually ask myself the following question - "If the entire dev team for foobar disappeared tomorrow, how much would it hurt" if the answer is "not much because I can maintain it myself while migrating away" then thats very different to "a lot because I don't understand it that well and/or it's massively complex".
Enterprise is a different world (even for a medium sized one like I work for) because (frankly) a lot of the programmers are doing it purely for the money and/or simply aren't that competent.
Not all of them by any means but I run into a lot of code that is just plain horrible, not "not the way I'd have done it" so much as "how does this thing even work?" and "Who possibly thought this was the right approach?".
I'm weird, I like LoB software development - I find that done well the feedback loop is very gratifying, you get to have an immediate affect on the companies bottom line and you have happier employees also the problems have a lot of hidden complexity which is intellectually stimulating.
As for government being slow and only change once a decade, you might be underestimating engineers in the government.
Here's the disability claim processing project I worked on when I was on SSA Digital Service. https://federalnewsradio.com/ask-the-cio/2017/01/ssa-turns-c...
The team I worked with managed to pull off React/Node.js/Redis/Zookeeper microservice framework over AWS using Jenkins as CI/CD pipeline. And most of the team came from an older enterprise stack using Java and IBM WebSphere. They were able to adapt to the new framework.
Be conservative, yes. But being overly conservative is part of the reasons why government is so far behind today.