For a work project, I recently had to visit about 200 government web sites from countries all over the world.
It's surprising how many of them not only load third-party content, but actually have banner and pop-over advertising on them, especially in Asia and Africa.
By comparison, even America's worst government web site¹ is better.
But then, yeah, it loads fast and does what it needs to do. I don’t think I’d want my taxpayer money getting some hip design studio to “modernize” it.
For a long time, .gov was for the federal government only.
In the days before search engines, people knew that their state's home page was state.xx.us. Lots of people memorized URLs back then, the way it was ordinary to know dozens of phone numbers off the top of your head.
I planned many a road trip by typing in travel.state.xx.us for the various states I planned to visit.