Github is very popular in the hobby/open-source world, but their offering still seems very "light" to me. In the "enterprise" world, products like Gerrit and Jira are probably beating github by a large margin.
I can't see how Jira is similar to Github. Do you mean Gitlab or Stash?
He probably means Bitbucket.
He probably meant what he wrote. Github has an issue tracker after all.