I agree that scrum is a soul-crushing nightmare & kanban is fine, but Jira a nightmare of a tool to use regardless of your process, IME.

Until someone comes along and tries to put some scrum into your kanban.

Ahh, someone woke up and chose violence today.

hilariously someone hated my joke enough to downvote it, but I think there's a kernel of truth.

"but once we can get our estimates right, then think of all that we can do with these burndown charts!"

Chevy Chase in “Christmas Vacation”: “Bend over and I’ll show you.”

Is there a context where time estimation is not employed, even implicitly?

No, never. I’ve stopped doing story points for this reason. When people want an estimate, I tend to chop things into reasonable same-sized chunks and do my best effort based on that. I prefer the NoEstimates approach and try to use past data to be a bit more “real” but it’s not always possible.

The truth is, if someone wants a time estimate, just do that and don’t beat around the bush. It’s too much effort to still be wrong.

Disagree; Jira + Kanban is if anything even worse. Since Jira is such a pain to use and Kanban doesn't have any requirement for estimation or timeboxing, people will write one ticket that says "do everything" and work on it for 6 months. While admittedly avoiding Jira for 6 months at a time is good for the soul, when you put your head down and work on something with no context for 6 months you usually end up making something that wasn't actually wanted and has to be thrown away or drastically reworked, which ends up being more soul crushing.