If they had that many ships, why didn't they mount their own evacuation? And if they made the ships afterwards, why are Romulans just a bunch of bums now? Why didn't they just relocate their government to one of their hundreds of planets and start over with even more restrictive government powers to capitalise on the disaster? I mean, they're an empire and not a single planet. I guess we, the viewers, are expected to fill in the gaps by saying "they felt sad because Romulan 1 went boom-boom so they all became space hobos" or something, but that kind of thing should ideally be in the text of the show.
As has been pointed out many times now, the AI plot is both a rehash of the end of the dreadful Discovery season 2, and the shittiest Mass Effect game.
200 ships isn’t much when you consider a population of billions of people. (Assuming they have earth type populations or even more.)
Twice that number isn’t much.
I’m sure they did evacuate plenty, but it wasn’t enough in the short time required hence Starfleet initially offering aid (albeit short-lived).
As for relocating the government, I assume they did just that, at least in part. The Romulan empire still appears to exist after all. And I shouldn’t judge the entire empire on the characters we met in that earlier episode where they found Nerak. That’s one colony, and I’m sure the working class and lower types feel the pressure just as everywhere from time immemorial.
Don’t get me wrong, the empire isn’t what it was. They have far from recovered. The fact Picard and co were still very concerned about entering Romulan territory when visiting the Borg cube, and all these mentions of treaties, etc suggest there’s a government of a kind, or at least secret service people holding power... which for the Romulan is pretty much the same thing. Even if they’re fragmented (which I think is quite likely) 200 ships isn’t very much considering the sheer scale of things.
As for the Palpatine comment, I won’t go into it here as this isn’t a Star Wars thread, but the answer is the same: interstellar scale. How many star destroyers are actually wrecked at the end of RotJ? About 3, I believe, although one was very big.