It was Thanksgiving weekend. They all decided to stick around for the weekend and do it. I don't think people were in a similar situation in March or April 2020.
This shop already has access in both cases to version control software, existing cloud-hosting accounts, tools for integrated development environments, tools like Slack, or whatever else. They're already set up to do this stuff. They probably have Figma for user interface design.
Once you have a pipeline like that, you don't have to recreate it from scratch for a new project. When you're cobbling together dozens of subcontractors across firms, often through third party intermediaries, the overhead of managing and maintaining that process versus what we have within Canada in the Canadian Digital Service and other places, you're already paying a markup just to get the system to work.