This is 100% correct. I run a govtech startup (similar to Seamless docs, the company mentioned in the article), and this was one of the key insights we've picked up over the last couple years.

When your process happens on paper, there's nothing forcing you to ensure it makes logical sense. You can draw whatever you want on a piece of paper, so a lot of the paper forms that people call "permits" are just messy reflections of the thought process of the person who originally conceived the process. Naturally, products that start by directly replicating a paper form are accommodating and perpetuating the lack of planning.

We've kind of taken a backwards approach where we don't accommodate direct translation of forms and instead provide tools that encourage people to think through the steps of their permitting processes to get them to make sense on a digital platform. More often than not, they discover glaring inefficiencies in the process which when fixed make everything work more smoothly even independent of the move to a digital platform.

Shameless plug: https://citygro.ws