You are correct that you could achieve similar activity reports with JIRA epics but it requires a level of rigor and homogeneity that I believe is hard to achieve in practice.
1. JIRA most often captures what we _plan_ to do rather than what we _actually_ do. You cannot build exhaustive activity reports from JIRA unless you request all contributions to be linked to issues. This is especially true for technical work which tends to not be tracked and become invisible.
2. Most sizable organizations have an inherent diversity of processes and tools across teams which makes producing consolidated dashboards extremely hard (e.g., one team using JIRA, a second using Linear, and a third using GitHub issues).
For these reasons, our approach is to capture work where it happens rather than where it is described, and to use a central definition of intents as the ontology. Finally, capturing efforts is only one part of the equation: we allow you to associate intents with metrics to evaluate impact.
