We used Jira at a small tech company 10 years ago and I actually kind of liked it. At the time, it was the best out of a bunch of mediocre (affordable) options. It offered nice integration with our mercurial BitBucket repos and that code review tool they had (forgot the name). We just used a simple workflow, and it was overkill for what we used it for, but it worked fairly smoothly.

Haven't used it since though.

We tried to self-host initially, and our server with "only" 4G of memory (remember, this was 10 year ago, and was a respectable amount for a small office server) couldn't handle it; it was super-slow even with just a few people. lol? None of us were Java peeps and didn't really know how to tweak the JVM thing. We ended up just using the hosted option, which wasn't that expensive anyway (certainly cheaper than having a dev spend a day on this).