Serving the “enterprise user” (the enterprise project manager and product owner, specifically) personas is why most other solutions are already so unproductive and unhelpful for the people doing the actual work. That’s where the negativity comes from. It’s like a mechanic’s ratchet having all kinds of bullshit attached to it to measure how many turns it makes and which socket’s getting used the most: that’s probably useful info for someone, but now the tool is terrible for the mechanic.

I think that's one way to look at productivity. I used to think like that when I was in a dysfunctional team as well. However, I do see value in issue tracking as I have seen how it helped drive top-down decisions on a large scale with high impact. An effective issue tracker can improve how resources are allocated, and create incentives, and promotions in smaller teams. The bigger the org, the harder it is to make this kind of decision correctly so there is value to be made here.

Tracking’s important. I think most of what matters could easily be achieved with simpler tools and less-intrusive processes, though, and in practice most of these attempts at hyper-legibility are misguided, largely because nobody’s even measuring the full cost of them.