I started to consider it a show show way earlier than 18 months ago. Jira is so terrible to use that it is hard to phantom how they are able to be paid for their product
They failed to rearchitect it to something suitable for the inherent flexibility though, so it remains a disaster area, but one that is uniquely able to fit the whims of any manager that can then mandate it for everyone else.
But the awful client-server architecture, where anything you do takes several seconds of waiting for the client to send who-knows-what to the server and get data back, even selecting something from a dropdown... that is absolutely just Jira. A competing product would be able to deliver much, MUCH snappier UX. Jira is just the crappiest, slowest UI that I have ever had the displeasure of being forced to work with.
They needed someone over there with the power to say no.