I found this to be true too, but I don't really get it. Doesn't seem like that complicated of a software. Maybe I'm only thinking like a SWE, and not PM and other laypersons that also need access.

It's definitely not that complicated. It's just one of those bits of software that is paid for and managed by people that aren't actually using it, so you get Jira shit.

I used to work for Dyson and they moved to Teamcenter for CAD management (basically a shitty VCS for CAD). Similarly to Jira it had all the features you'd ever want in its white paper, but it was abysmal to use - even worse than Jira.

Anyway the nicest bug tracking software I've used so far is Phabricator. Quite a lot nicer than anything else, but it is tightly integrated, and I wouldn't really recommend Phabricator these days because a) no integrated CI system, b) it's semi abandoned, and c) PHP. And yes that does matter. (Though TBF it beats Ruby.)

I've generally not had an interest in working for one of the big tech companies, but the opportunity to escape JIRA is tempting.

Yeah, Google's Buganizer was the best bug tracker that I ever used.

...and it still wasn't great.

It's pretty much perfect in my eyes. Not being open source is probably the biggest thing I'd fault it for. The world deserves better than GitHub issues and jira, pity it can't be used by anyone else.