It is just a ticketing system with a very robust business process engine.

Most complaints I’ve heard about Jira boil down to the horrible processes people choose to implement in it.

Thats the rub too. Jira setup in a simple way is what most people need. Yet you get process people in there and suddenly you have 50+ fields to fill out before you can even start working on something. Then another 20+ fields to fill out to close out a ticket. I went from taking 2-3 hours total to plan out a sprint, to it taking 3-4 days and many meetings. And no one can tell me how these fields are used day to day, what are they trying to solve, and how it was better than what we had. If I wanted to do waterfall I would not be having 2 week sprints and this process would be wildly different.

My (cynical) experience is that those fields are simply there to generate arbitrary metrics for the process people to show to higher-ups to demonstrate that they are “managing” the project.

Feudal-like political jockeying for power produces this nonsense. I've been beleaguered with such nonsense for most of my 28-year career, working in 3 Fortune 250's. It certainly doesn't help that JIRA is designed to be flexible enough to be all things to all people for all purposes. And that's why CIO's love to buy it.

The same thing happens to orgs using Salesforce, custom fields get added and ignored ad infinititum.

People really underestimate the loss of productivity and morale of using slow web-based tools. Now multiply it for 10k.