Doing these things is not easy and they take a lot of time and effort. But from a short look at the article it seems that there were issues with expectations:

the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa

Like what do you expect when using an ODF first tool for OpenXML (Microsoft Office) documents? Euro-Office would be a better fit, from my ONLYOFFICE experience. It’s not perfect but it’s the more drop-in solution for their use case. It’s sad that this has come to an end because of what a good, experienced Linux user could tell them even before they began.