I think you are not familiar with how governments work. They are not going to rely on a random git repo, they are going to have contractors to ensure a basic level of support and bug fixing. And some contractors to ensure development and availability of tooling. And deployment and integration. They are also going to test, audit and validate updates, not just pull from remote.
Also, in some cases there are research agencies doing some work as well (sometimes they have been doing it for a long time on not-so-sexy but vital projects like Inria and the open source tax code in France).
The product is a vehicle. Governments are looking for an assurance. That comes from the reputation of the system integrators/contractors.
That said, Birmingham UK turned a £38 million Oracle Financials project into a £90 million failure after including re-implementation costs. That kind of stuff probably isn't replaceable, simply because they spent all the money.
The last thing we need is cheap consulting messing with open source projects. I don't want TCS and Accenture developing libreoffice or stuff like that and turn it into shit
It seems to be working for QGIS, where multiple consulting companies provide probably the majority of the project's manpower. It's certainly a change from fully-volunteer-driven FLOSS without deadlines or promised features, but I think it's for the better for such a large project.
I wouldn't call it a shallow dismissal. If you used Libreoffice you already know the current state of it. It is slow, buggy, way behind in features compared to MS Office and the UI is a mess. If I tried to take Excel away from my co-workers and gave them Libreoffice Calc there would be a riot.
I introduced libreoffice at work in 2013 while reducing Microsoft dependencies around the office and we had success migrating from Excel and Word for about 20 employees.
Also, in some cases there are research agencies doing some work as well (sometimes they have been doing it for a long time on not-so-sexy but vital projects like Inria and the open source tax code in France).