I took slightly over year IIRC for basically everything written in Romanian to go from Cyrillic script to Latin script. And it was very, very hard on many people, especially middle age and older. As various government jobs switched to Latin script, quite a few people where let go because they couldn't adapt to the new system quickly enough.
I was in school at the time, and I remember that even for us it took some adjustment. I think it took me at least several months to fully switch (I'm not a native speaker, and we Romanian was a mandatory class from second grade up).
A friend of my mother's, a native Moldovan with roots back to time immemorial, still struggles with Latin script even though it's been 30 years since the change.
Which is not surprising given that Soviets always had put a special focus on strong educational system. They failed in many areas, but they did "liquidate illiteracy" everywhere they could ([2])
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Mongolia#:~:text=....
The Western drive to assume that people in poorer countries are all uneducated seems to me to reflect something Hannah Arendt wrote about Soviet totalitarianism, namely that once Soviet propaganda had claimed that the Moscow metro is the only working metro in the world, there emerged a need to conquer the whole world, just so all other metros could be shut down to ensure the truth of the ideology.