Administrative language aside, they're basically a public incubator, built from the ground up for starting software projects with a focus on user experience for individual citizens and civil servants. The projects have a very "tech startup" structure: agile development, lots of CI-CD, code is open-source and usually hosted on Github, etc.
From what little I've seen, they seem to be pretty competent. I've opened a few minor issues on Github (about typos and stuff) and they replied quickly. I've used one of their projects (the one for validating documents when looking for an apartment) and it worked fine. Some of the projects they're listing seem pretty exciting too.
More info there: https://beta.gouv.fr/en
Seriously, the French government hasn't always been great with IT, but it's getting there fast.
Re the government: you can look at the Github pages of various projects. The article mentions this list:
From what I remember of the last time I browsed through state startup projects, there was a lot of Node.js and Python.