JIRA is a framework for making assembly lines out of knowledge workers. When you're a middle manager at a decent sized company, a major problem you face is that the mass of knowledge workers beneath you are
opaque: you have no way of knowing whether they're working or not. Another problem you face is that they're
uppity: people who went to college and got used to managing their own time now have all kinds of idiosyncratic ideas about how to manage their own time and arrange their own working lives. Since you are a middle manager you despise local differences. Since you are a manager you're pretty sure that only you and your lieutenants can be trusted with this kind of decision making power. Adopting JIRA is a powerful level to put people back in their place as work item churning machines. Constraints such as only certain people can create or assign tickets, only certain people can mark them completed, only certain states are valid transitions from other states, etc. implement a level of domination over white-collar workforces that managers would be otherwise uncomfortable asserting face to face.
Other ticketing systems do not work nearly as well for this purpose because they are designed mainly as external brains or communication platforms for workers, and they assume a level of worker autonomy in moving tasks through their lifecycle. In Trello you cannot make it so that a PM has to sign off before a card is moved to the in-progress column, or that only in-progress cards can have code reviews associated with them. JIRA eats these kinds of requirements for breakfast.
EDIT: This is not to say you can't use JIRA in a workflow-neutral way, or that everyone uses it for this reason, but I would submit that it's JIRA's differentiated advantage.
Other ticketing systems do not work nearly as well for this purpose because they are designed mainly as external brains or communication platforms for workers, and they assume a level of worker autonomy in moving tasks through their lifecycle. In Trello you cannot make it so that a PM has to sign off before a card is moved to the in-progress column, or that only in-progress cards can have code reviews associated with them. JIRA eats these kinds of requirements for breakfast.
EDIT: This is not to say you can't use JIRA in a workflow-neutral way, or that everyone uses it for this reason, but I would submit that it's JIRA's differentiated advantage.