Wifey and I were flying in J on QR38 (then to HKG) on Sunday evening. Boarding time passed and we were getting close to departure time. The plane was clearly ready and the numerous staff impatient to start boarding, but no announcement. Lots of people (including us) standing at boarding gate..Around departure time, they finally made an announcement that there will be a delay due to late arrival of the aircraft which was clearly untrue as QR37 was only 5 min late. Finally we saw the new football (soccer) Ballon d'Or Ousmane Dembele arrive with an entourage. They immediately boarded. After a few minutes boarding started, but we remained standing on the jetway. Apparently Dembele was being photographed and interviewed onboard. He plays with French team PSG which is also owned by Qatar, so that was for advertising. Then the pilots went through their pre-departure checks and there was apparently a problem. After standing in the jetway for a very long time, they made us "disembark" saying that there was a technical delay. To cut the story short, the flight was cancelled 90 min and the Ballon d'Or finally disembarked. Not good advertising for QR.

They announced that we had to retrieve our checked bags in Hall 1. Despite the ten staffs, there was no one to guide us and you can guess that it is extremely difficult to find your way from post-police/security to the delivery belts. Various pax groups were going up and down stairs, searching and crossing each other . Once you got past police (one officer) then down to arrival carrousel, then up again to departure. No one to help or guide on the way. They finally arranged for transport and bookings to nearby hotels. Although there were many staff chatting together at the check-in counters, they were useless. All we were told is the hotel name, a QR code for the irrops team, and to go outside (cold and windy) and wait for a shuttle just outside of "door 10". As you can guess the process took forever and no-one at "door 10" outside to guide us, so 10 pax just standing there when we arrived. After 20 min, had to go back inside to ask where is the shuttle. Actually there was a bus parked quite further away on a parallel road and the driver was in his bus half asleep. Pax trickled. The QR agent had told the J pax that a shuttle would leave as soon as ten pax boarded. Of course that did not happen, When arriving at the hotel around 2am, the clerk initially had no idea what to do. He had to call QR and we waited another 30 min there. As elderly having three heavy bags, this was nightmarish. I was worried as all flights next day seemed already full. Finally we got a whatsapp/email from QR around 6am that we were rebooked early morning to Brussels connecting to CX for HKG. Not a bad rerouting. But we had to call a UBER to get back to airport in time. With no diner and very little sleep
Last year, we had a similar last-minute tech cancellation in SGN. But QR managed to hire a large number of staff and we were guided at each step. Good rerouting too via Whatsapp. But this new experience was traumatic and very poorly handled by CDG QR staff. In my 50 years of flying and quite a few such irrops, I never had such a catastrophic management by the numerous local QR
team. And there was no external excuse such as bad weather, a strike or some war conflict.
Apologies for the long post