It seems like if you are going to pay for a bunch of SaaS seats AND a team of technicians/engineers for make it work, you might as well just do the latter and roll your own solutions...

A lot of these SaaS are just glorified Rails apps with a patina of professional "security" and "reliability", and loads of extra junk that your co will never use.

Trust me, if someone could clone Jira and its functionality they would have done so already. Truth is that if you build one product for 20 years you have a giant lead in features. If all it took was having a Kanban board then Jira would have died years ago.

isn't it one of those "No one ever got fired for buying XXXXXX" type of situation?

Maybe i'm wrong, but the impression I had of Jira is that just like using sharepoint for file storage, the C-level people want it because they were told that's what big enterprise are using. And if it doesn't fit the need of the company and everyone hates it, they just blame the employees or lack of training.

It’s just so flexible that tracking projects and working together is easier with it. Decades of feature requests have made it good for people who want everything made for them or people who want to customise.

I can't see the difference between a "solution provider" that hosts your Jira and just getting Atlassian to do it. What's stopping the solution provider from accidentally running a script that deletes some customer's files and struggling to do a partial backup restore?

Because you can get the best parts of self-hosted and managed services. And on that backup question: self-hosted Atlassian is vastly easier to protect against disasters. The problem these Atlassian guys had arose from multi-tenant architecture. Usually managed service providers will host your stack on individual databases and VMs, and backing up the software is just a matter of taking pg_dumps and rsyncing certain directories (pretty old school) or just taking disk level snapshots.

Many medium-large corporations have their own cloud environments that their IT Ops control. Solution providers can host Atlassian stacks on their own cloud environment where they are not affected by data privacy concerns (it's in their already green-lit cloud providers data center) so they can host it behind a firewall with only VPN access allowed. They can also do all the magic you can usually do with web software like put a frontend proxy in front of it, or use more flexible/legacy authentication methods. Not to mention that for example you could have a Jira Cloud that you would need to integrate with a SCM program. Jira data could be "OK" to live in the cloud but code would be a big no-no. These problems can be solved by having them all live behind the firewall.

A competent managed solution provider also has consultants that can train or instruct on usage. It costs but it is simpler and faster than having to go through the forums or send a support ticket for every small issue to Atlassian itself.

I would assume the MSP is running a dedicated instance and can do a full/backup restore just for the user they're supporting.

If it's some multi-tenant solution it's no better.

Correct. There are probably not a lot of MSPs that have so many customers that they need to share that much data, and their customers probably use MSPs for the strict purpose that they don't want to share things with other companies.