Jira would be okay without needless amount of plug-ins, extensions, and dumb workflows one has to follow. Accidentally put it in the wrong state? Enjoy writing to someone who can fix it. Besides, it is slow as fuck and is getting slower with all the tickets (over 80k on our instance) it has to track. Search is shit, and it is shoving AI in my face on every step.

Plain Jira is not bad. In my second company that I work for, I set up OpenProject and it has been working flawlessly for about 5 years already, it can easily track GitLab commits, branches, and merge requests, and do basic time tracking. It has some nifty features like "budget users" when you want to do budgeting with a "ghost user".