You are conflating minimal and cheap. A good minimal design takes the same sort of person (who may or may not enjoy milky coffee) as a good design of any other aesthetic.

You make an assumption that super simple website is the optimal balance between quality and price. I think that it's wrong. First, minimalistic websites with good UX are not significantly cheaper. And second, if the webstite has a lot of visitors, it makes sense to pay lot of money for even small improvements of the UX.

I pay taxes and I want government sites that are easy to navigate and efficiently designed. Black text on white background does not meet my requirements. This design - which I bet puts over 50% of user requirements in those eight simple pictures at the top - meets my requirements.

A page full of black text on a white background? Sounds like you're on some kind of ideological trip.

You want government websites to look like a domain-squatter's page: https://www.gov.uk/ ?

Have you seen the state of some government websites today? Sure they're "minimal" (often not, sometimes they're just plain ugly) but almost always difficult to navigate. You underestimate how difficult it is to organize information-dense government websites. I think people will ultimately get more value out of a well designed site.

Why should public services be ugly?

Says the guy who thought "cooking recipes as Gantt charts" was a good idea: http://kangasbros.fi/visual-cookbook/

The cost of designing a page such as this over a minimalist website is so negligible in terms of the amount the government spend and take everyday, that it is simply not necessary to nitpick. This could be just thought of as an experiment in governmental website design. I think sometimes the "people" act like the worst managers that they micro-manages and want to squeeze every penny, while missing the big picture.

I drink espressos.

Never underestimate the competition between municipalities, which are also fought on the web.

What does paying taxes and drinking lattes have to do with building a website? Yes you pay taxes to the government, and yes they're in the process of updating their websites (and largely doing a fantastic job of it), but your taxes don't enter into it. The government allocates a certain amount of money towards the process, and that money gets spent on building new websites. That's it. You don't pay for it directly. Please don't pretend that you are.

Plain text is not accessible. Plain text fails to help people with motor control problems; with cognitive problems; etc.

Yeah, this is definitely the one waste of tax dollars that you should be outraged about.