It's not a unique occurrence that I wonder "why the hell is it done like this?!" only to find it was a decision I was part of with developers who had left in a least-worst-change trade-off. Jira or products like it help us avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Put another way, part of the art is not just the code, but the code that's not there. Jira/tickets are one way of managing that data.
And at other times, it's just a tool for bureaucracy, I get that.
I also always search jira for a particular issue that I am having to see if someone else has already solved it or a reason for it not to be solved. Sometimes it works quite well saving me a lot of time.
I say this as someone who loathes JIRA but still exists in the real world where you need to collaborate to design something.