Thank you for your reply. You might be right about that. I worked in academia before and I absolutely loved it. Maybe that's the style of work for me.

In my defense, I think that was a special case. This was a product to be certified as a medical device. Regulations require keeping records of all changes to the code that can be linked to well-defined "software requirements" and "stakeholder requirements". This can be done in a complex spreadsheet or by linking issues/merge requests in a certain way. I chose the issues. Also, as the product might affect health outcomes, I felt responsibility to make the product as solid and maintainable as possible.