You could also link to other tickets or Epics with "relates to" or "blocked by".

And at that point why not Bugzilla?

Because "Oh, come on!". Just because you can implement any process in a list of text files and grep it does not mean you should. Jira has features that Bugzilla does not or needs plugins for. Should you just throw all of that away?

The complaint is that Jira's "features" are not much better. It's completely manual and only works if you strictly enforce conventions.