Their profiles don’t look like obvious bots :/

Bots. But bots can be paid people these days

Bear in mind as well that the Scottish government rejected a lot of the privatisation that the remainder of the UK went through, so ‘government’ doesn’t just mean civil servants in offices, it means things like Scottish Forestry and Scottish Water as well. Need to manage small teams of people over very large areas who are frequently out of mobile phone contact, as well as sharing information with subcontractors who will frequently be one-man-band operators who may just have a van and a mobile phone; no laptop, no IT team.

So ‘convenient’, but also ‘almost nothing else would be practicable’.

In some countries generals communicate via WhatsApp, and one can call that luck, because in other cases they use PSTN.

Of course, that state and its generals are not considered good enough to be called that seriously by anyone.

Probably because it’s the defacto messaging app in the UK and nobody probably questioned it.