I’ve been on both sides of this equation. If someone is dinging you for doing extra work, it could be a sign that your priorities are not aligned.
Like, if you’ve got a tight deadline coming up, it’s not the time to spend a week making CI slightly faster. On the other hand, if someone is telling you to not do work (right now), then they also need to help be responsible for finding time to do that work and understanding the impacts of that work never gets done.
I explain this to people as the tension between important urgent work. Some work is important but never（rarely) urgent. And if you ignore important work (like maintenance) it might become urgent at a very bad time.
Also there is value in having an audit trail of who did what when and why, both for operations and system evolution, and for all the compliance junk. Not so much value that a tiny bit of cleanup needs a huge amount of overhead though.
If you want a trail, there is already the PR. It has description that explains why the change makes sense, code changes, reviewers, if relevant screenshots and videos.
If you want small PRs that contain one meaningful, easy to review change, and that change only concerns the development team, there is no reason to create a ticket for the sake of creating a ticket.
Also, in some dysfunctional teams creating a ticket means it requires prioritization and you will most likely never work on it and ticket will be deleted five years from today when nobody you know with at the company anymore.
Believe me, no sane CFO (or include any person not in the dev team or product team) will look up your Jira ticket explaining why you wanted to refactor the GitHub actions because you had to update 10 files whenever there’s is a new version of a tool used in your pipeline.
Also, usually these changes are so small and straightforward, arguing about putting it in a ticket takes longer than reviewing it and merging it.
The most important properties of real audit trails are that they are side effects of the actual work, created during or after the fact without interfering with how the work is done.
The thing about work tickets is that they have none of those properties. Besides almost every developer insists on working with a complete audit trail that is just ignored because people don't want to look at it.
Compliance guarantee is a different beast, that isn't improved in any way by work tickets, but may need more work than the audit trail.