You're referring to the on-prem Jira. That might suck, sure. My experience has been purely using Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud, both of which I've found to be snappy and responsive.
My last company switched several teams to Jira Cloud. My current company started with Cloud when we moved over from other tools.
Cloud does not give you the flexibility of your own plugins, your own redundancy design, or your own server upgrades. On top of that, the performance is pretty variable and is far worse than a self-hosted Jira on fast hardware.
It’s interesting to me that your lack of experience to make a comparison qualifies you in some way to criticize the experience I actually have.
Amusingly, exactly opposite experience here. That said, our on-prem is jira and confluence integrated with db on same machine, and apache in front doing additional caching. I imagine like so many things it is how you set it up...
If you read my previous comment, I said it was largely the specific poor plugin that caused most of the performance issue with the database queries. I never complained about the overall speed of on-prem Jira. That was the assertion of the person who’s only ever used the cloud version.
