Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but we moved to Gitlab Issues. Project Managers are missing some features, but the devs (including me) like it a lot more due to integrating so well with PRs/commits.
The problem with this though, is that commonly a requirement (ticket) does not map exactly to a single code repository. I feel that it is breaking encapsulation in a sense to be dealing with issues at the repo level. The repo and the code are implementation details of the business requirements. The tickets describing requirements belong at the next level up of abstraction?
One way to approach this would be using Epics [0], which can live at the group-level. Child epics and/or issues can then be used for more finely tuned requirements.