> it is bought and sold to managers
That is the root of the issue.
I've seen many small orgs adopt trello, slack, discord and other tools organically. I've rarely seen a small org willingly choose jira or teams; that is a choice that is almost always imposed by non-users of those tools.
JIRA was a dramatic improvement at one point, however, it is bought and sold to managers, so it is unsurprising it eventually converges to managerial overengineering.