No, Jira loading is relatively OK and on par with other SPAs. It's got a CTRL+SHIFT+P style actions menu for tickets which helps cut down on point and click pain (especially for linking issues etc). Setting up statues and workflows and how they map to a board is relatively straightforward.

There are lots of things where Jira falls short, but the pain points on an under-resourced self hosted instance of ten years ago are nothing like the ones you'll find on Jira cloud today.