JIRA is what you make of it. My comment is that it requires a ton of gardening to keep it useful. You probably need 1 person for every 5-10 devs who has JIRA-wrangling as a primary responsibility that eats a significant chunk of their time. Part of this is the nature of project management, but part of it is that JIRA's workflows for basic tasks like "close as duplicate" or "do this action on all issues linked to issue X" are terrible and require way too many clicks. In shops that don't properly allocate people to this task, it's extra debt that just piles up and becomes a mess, so I could definitely picture some of the hate being as a result of those experiences.

The author may also be using "JIRA" as a proxy for a heavily pre-planned waterfall culture with a big emphasis on time tracking, doing what you're told, fake-metrics success theatre, etc. (cf. https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-f...)