That implies they felt like they wouldn't have been able to do the work nearly as well within the confines of the digital bug tracking system.
There is such power to spatial visualization and tangible interaction that we lose out on in digital interfaces.
This makes me think about the Dynamicland vision again...
It's a tool failure because these activities are of course core bug tracking tasks, yet bug tracking tools tend to be a poor fit for tracking unplanned side activities. These side activities do not match the regular state progression of bugs, so in-tool tracking requires that someone creates custom logic for the emerging separate process. Usually, there aren't resources for that. (It's also hard to get rid of the excess state and logic once the side project is done.) If you have to use free-form text fields or labels anyway, the spreadsheet option isn't so bad, despite its obvious flaws.
I didn't use whole pages, I exported the bugs as a CSV and then used glabels to extract a few fields and lay them out before printing (on ordinary paper, not label paper, which I then cut up). Once sorted it was then easy to apply labels in Jira
The other useful part was to have a physical way to show our overoptimistic boss just how much work his plans entailed