I agree. Cloud vs. Data Center is a big issue that doesn't get brought up enough when bashing Jira.
DC (and formerly Server edition) are pretty good products that do their thing fine and are fast enough for typical use. Unfortunately, Server edition was discontinued and DC is too expensive, so formerly happy developers are forced to switch to Cloud edition, which is horrendously slow. Jira Cloud also lacks some loved features, such as the plaintext comment editor [0].
Atlassian desperately needs to pause on new acquisitions and new features for at least two years and rework all of the products they acquired and unify them. Literally every Atlassian product offering has a different way of doing things, no consistency anywhere. Oh, and half of the functionality has no API, and there is no first party Terraform provider so you have to do everything by hand every fucking time.
The abusive workflow bullshit by clueless middle managers is another problem in itself, thankfully I'm in the lucky position to tell people "no, we won't do that".