in the late 90's, I knew the guy that had somehow secured and was running the .so ccTLD single-handedly. In the age of $70/year register.com bills, it seemed insane that a single person could be responsible for an entire TLD. I'm glad to hear that some things on the internet are still run by people.
A large number of ccTLDs are still run by a single random person deep in the bowels of an IT department at some university. I was just at an ICANN meeting in Madrid last week and met some of them.
Also, we (Charleston Road Registry) are definitely not a small company, but we run ~45 TLDs with a team of engineers much smaller than 45, so we have a ratio of TLDs to engineers significantly higher than 1:1.