It is often used in swedish technical writing to separate and foreign word or an acronym from the plural so "VPS:es" in english is VPS:erna in swedish. I do not know if this is a swedish tradition, it most probably exists in Germany or the US. I've seen this use in Sweden for several decades.

I've seen it used by Swedes and Swedish speaking Finns, at least.

Even in English, the use case you’re referring to would not have an apostrophe—apostrophes are used for contractions and possession, not plurality.

Meet our hero: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-39459831.

It's a fairly old tradition specific to Swedish and Finnish. Wikipedia has an explanation. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colon_(punctuation)

If I knew what was up with us swedes I'd be consulting on that instead.