For me, being a useful piece of opinionated software means "hey, we want you to do things this way." Then rely on the users being smart enough to not hang them

For me, being a useful piece of opinionated software means "hey, we want you to do things this way." Then rely on the users being smart enough to not hang themselves with the rope given. What you're talking about is, as you said, bad management. The reason opinionated software comes and goes, and JIRA stays is specifically because just like you can build sync on top of async, you can build opinionated on top of flexible, but not vice versa.