GitHub’s UX is worth it, IMO. GitLab tries to do too many things and it’s really hard to get my bearings (it’s like Azure DevOps’ problem times 10). And if GitHub Actions doesn’t work, it’s really easy to integrate third party CI solutions.
That's subjective. Gitlab does many more things, but nobody is forcing you to use them, and unused menu buttons don't matter much for the main workflows ( commits, MRs, repo visualisation, wikis, CI/CD).
We've put a lot of effort into our integration with Jira. The docs [1] detail how it works and we have a blog [2] with some screenshots so you can see what it looks like in action.
What kind of troubles have you encountered?
1 - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jira/
2 - https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/25/integrating-gitlab-...
But back then you'd still find quite a few paths back to the Gitlab issues - it never really went away, it just replaced a few issue links.