>> There should always be a way for tech-illiterate people to ask someone, and fill their forms

Isn't that more open to fraud and abuse though by the "someone" whether that is a gov employee or otherwise.

If it's a government employee (as it should), it shouldn't be open to fraud and abuse, no. There should be a trail of what happened

Yes, there 'should' be a trail. And there's someone and a process to check that trail. And a process to find the issues, correctly so, and fix, and do all that on a timely basis, and reimburse the person for damages, ...

PS: I have actually suffered through some of this, badly so, though in an unrelated setting.

It comes back to which system is more robust/mistake-proof and more practically recoverable.

Sure, but that's how Governments worked for decades before widespread access to laptops / mobile phones...

Things may have been like that in the past does not by itself say that they need to continue like that. If there are opportunities to make progress or improve, why not.

However, I thought more about this and I now agree to your position. Till there is still a significant enough percentage population that is not setup to use the new approaches (digitization/Internet in the example at hand), the older methods need to stick. Meanwhile, assuming the new approaches actually offer more value, there should be an appropriate push for moving the remaining population towards it.

FTA: 'To apply for their services, customers could either use an old ASP form on the website, or follow a manual process.'