I think you're right. Since I started working at $DAY_JOB, the company has transitioned from a completely paper filing system to an electronic system. It has been a long process, identifying a process, digitizing the records, and creating internally developed applications so ordinary employees (like me) involved with the process can record the information which used to be scratched onto paper forms and stuffed into filing cabinets.

For a long time, they were doing okay. They got locked into FileMaker pretty early, but otherwise the whole system was created and maintained internally. Then one day, management got sold on this expensive proprietary ERP system. Spent a couple million dollars on integration, and now everything is tied to this absolute dogshit, poorly integrated system for eternity. The thing absolutely sucks and for the same money they could have just used fucking PostgreSQL and developed a much better-integrated suite of applications internally.

These decisions are made for exactly the reasons you mention. Managers are universally illiterate, incurious, self-confident bastards who will set millions of dollars on fire and shackle the company's future to parasitic vendors simply because they are affiliated with a large firm owned by a political kingmaker who sent a marketing rep to jingle keys in front of their face. We had a new executive who was trying to "modernize" the company he inherited from his father, and apparently modernization simply means getting fleeced by one of the richest firms in the world.

The managers who were responsible for this course of action are all gone now (not because of this), but their legacy remains. As much as they should get rid of it, the technical burden is now likely too high. They would have to migrate a decade's worth of records and re-develop about 50 internal applications from scratch.