It's not ideal certainly, most such cases would be either a variation of an existing application or something that isn't business facing such as a compliance or operational metrics report.
The key thing is that the testing, release and deployment tooling were not a significant bottleneck. You could develop the code, perform testing in a production like environment and sign it off with a minimum of down time in between waiting for compilation, package building, etc. So a lot of that was down to Python being interpreted.
This just makes me shudder a little bit. I've seen such things before, even recently at my current job. These kinds of applications tend to be a nightmarish mix of unmaintainably overengineered and underdesigned terrible code.