Jira excels when there is a Jira governance committee comprised of people who actually understand data flow and are the only ones with admin privileges.

Too often some manager asks for (and is given) admin access and starts “improving” things.

Sure, anybody can create custom fields and screens and slap together a janky “workflow”, but well-oiled Jira Ops prevent an explosion of custom fields, they curate the create, browse and edit screens of each issue type to only show the fields that are important at that stage, use custom screens on workflow transitions along with validators and conditions to help ensure an issue is always in a reasonable state, etc. Then users don’t complain about the tooling.

But Jira governance takes time, effort, discussions with stakeholders, etc. And without it Jira gets a bad rap.

Jira excels when there is a Jira governance committee

True but oversimplified. Without a Jira administrative state, along with of course democratically elected Jira executive and legislature and a duly appointed Jira Supreme Court, Jira governance committees over time tend to slide into self-dealing, tyranny and eventually mass executions of anti-Jira resistance factions.

Sustaining Jira regime legitimacy over time is far more involved than simply a governance committee with its stakeholder discussions and five year plans for new custom fields.

My current company has company managed boards, 6000 devs and we have about 250 custom fields. I work in a research team and we only need Kanban and I can't change the issue type if something is created. Hell.

Yeah, jira is very flexible. A well managed jira can be pretty great