As a current Jira admin, I constantly have to fight this. A non dev team came into Jira and implemented a huge octopus of a workflow (despite my strong advice against it) and were shocked to find out it didn't really help them work better.

The handful of teams inside that department that I've gotten to switch over to a simpler To Do / In Progress / Done style workflow have been much happier.

Jira has many, many faults, but most of them are what the users do to themselves.

In my experience, it's both.

Jira is laggy as fuck and makes every interaction I have with it take 5 times as long as it needs to, or at least it has been in the two organizations that I've worked for that used it.

We're in what I tend to think of as Jira's pit of despair: there's no explicit support for the on-prem instance; workflow configuration regularly seems to go wrong and has a wide blast radius when it does; nobody trusts the data so we don't get any useful reporting out of it; the UI is... not exactly slow, but I wouldn't call it snappy either; and there's no money for addons that would genuinely help us.

Github Projects would be absolutely fine for us, but we can't switch out because Jira is "what everyone uses" and "has more features", despite us not really using any of them.

All the extra plugins etc. that people bolt in to get those extra features really slow it down too.

If you turn bureaucrats into UI designers, you’re gonna have a bad time. We have several classes of tooling that do just that.

Atlassian tools are particularly overt in their belief that the tool belongs to the managers and not the team. Bamboo especially.

I also don't like JIRA itself, it feels bloated from the get-go.