Jira isn’t nearly as bad as it’s made out to be, and I struggle to suggest any real alternative. The problem is that Jira do a lot of different things, and mixing those those things results in people having a bad time.

An example: don’t try to use Kanban board unless you’re planning on doing so in all project. Jira will happily show “kanban” tickets in the same overview as an ITIL incident, resulting in teams having to mentally switch between different workflows.