I tried linear demo and many other task tracker/issue trackers. Many of them were just that: "fine" but then wanted a large pricing increase for OIDC connectors or similar.

The core issue isn't hard so I built my own, native OIDC auth, status, comments, plus I made communication a first class citizen, tracked it its own status workflow. Another nice thing I like is that status has attached a workflow that associates actions with a status transitions and task screens are defined in data. All APIs go through a single endpoint that can be intrinsically combined into batches. Still fast. It isn't that great, but I like it so much better then any of these commercial offerings.