Yes, it's still Microsoft, but they've forgotten about it, so it runs entirely adequately and is actually a surprisingly okay github replacement. It does nothing special, but it does do everything, just in a way you often would rather it wouldn't. It doesn't have the flexibility of JIRA for the ticketing, and the deployment machinery doesn't have the fanciness ( and vendor threat ) of chaining github actions, but it does handle both.

I haven't used gitlab, so I'm curious to hear what makes it a "complete mess" too.

* Microsoft's headless chicken naming strategy in full force, it's a miracle they haven't yet renamed and rebranded it to align with copilot yet.