Jira excels when there is a Jira governance committee comprised of people who actually understand data flow and are the only ones with admin privileges.

Too often some manager asks for (and is given) admin access and starts “improving” things.

Sure, anybody can create custom fields and screens and slap together a janky “workflow”, but well-oiled Jira Ops prevent an explosion of custom fields, they curate the create, browse and edit screens of each issue type to only show the fields that are important at that stage, use custom screens on workflow transitions along with validators and conditions to help ensure an issue is always in a reasonable state, etc. Then users don’t complain about the tooling.

But Jira governance takes time, effort, discussions with stakeholders, etc. And without it Jira gets a bad rap.