If you strip away all that stuff, you could be using another, better product and should be.
- Trello feels like a toy (it's not, we use it extensively for core business activities but I don't like it for software) - GitHub issues feels too focussed on devs - Todoist is clearly designed for solo use - Monday.com is for more generic project management - Notion is a mess when you have a lot of tickets - I don't want to use ClickUp
After going though all of those I realised that Jira is pretty good for me.
It's possible to use Jira well (ish) but it requires constant effort. If you ever take your eye off the ball you'll have irreversible transitions and workflows that only certain people can do and you'll start using ticket numbers instead of issue descriptions and end up fighting the tool more than working.
But I guess the mystery to me is, without all the "extra" - how complex is this topic space, really? It feels like it's just a shim over something like Github issues so you can render the board, rather then anything else.