I’ve been working at my tech startup for almost a year now and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. Everyone does their own thing. You take on a feature in Jira, create a PR, address the revisions, merge and that’s done. There’s not really a “manager” as we work as a team towards the same goal autonomously.
I have because I quit. I got a big raise at the same time and more responsibilities.
I don’t believe scrum is evil though. It can be as good as lean/kanban. It’s mostly misused by managers and that’s why it got a bad name.
Jira can be acceptable too if you only use what you need, and forget all the metrics required by managers.