Well, apart from float numbers and booleans, all other types can only be represented by a string in JSON. Date with timezone? String. BigNumber/Decimal? String. Enum? String. Everything is a string in JSON, so why bother?
The main thing keeping people inside is that they cannot leave NK anymore. NK government did a complete border lockdown during the pandemic and they managed to sign a deal with China and Russia that every defector will be caught and brought back to NK. The only way out now is through the sea and that's a death sentence.
The difference between the czar and Putin is that many people in Russia are (or were, before the war) living a decently good life. But back in the days if you were not an aristocrat, you were pretty much a slave living in utterly horrible conditions. Wikipedia can give you a quick overview of 19th century - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia
In short: non stop wars with everyone (over 1m civilian peasants died in just 1812 alone), serfdom (literally slavery in the case of the Russian Empire) was only abolished in 1861, Russians endured SIX cholera pandemics during the century before the revolution with millions dead, there was a massive famine at the turn of the century, and lack of industrialisation meant that the economy of Russian Empire was dying. The late Russian Empire was a meat grinder, people had nothing to lose. And they knew that they will die soon anyways, either from famine, physical abuse or an illness.
Military is the only thing they have. It might not be the most modern, but they have more artilery shells than any other country. Other stockpiles are huge AF as well. Almost 4% of their population are in active military service and 2% more are reservists. In terms of head count, they have almost as many active personel as Russia while having a fraction of population. Plenty of disposable meat!
The software is getting heavier because content, not code. Again, we can look at the games. Take some old games like GTA V or Skyrim, they will fly on modern high end machines! Now add mods with 8K textures, higher definition models, HDR support, etc and these old games will bend over your RTX4090.
I guess you live in a country with loads of spare IP addresses. Here in the UK they change every few days and IPs get rotated between all ISPs, so you can't even deduct which ISP I'm using. And sometimes my IP is not even a mainland UK IP, but some weird shit from across the world, because Empire, lol.
You can simply do battery swaps. Plane refueling already requires heavy machinery and industrial scale. I bet battery swaps will be faster than refueling.
What that means is that you cannot rely on numbers in JSON. Just use strings.