Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things

If I'm at the point of contributing a PR to a dependency, I've already identified the root cause in detail. There's no way a change log should be going into that level of detail, or else you're just duplicating the Git log for no reason.

Will the change log make mention of fixing the bug? Perhaps. But I'm going to want to read the technical details of the fix to make sure they've specifically addressed my issue, and not just a similar problem. What is the performance impact of the fix? Are there security implications they've explained in the commit message.

I'm a software engineer, not an end user, I want the technical details of my dependencies.

You can do the same when you write commit messages. "Wrap user and account update in a transaction" - "Delete temp files after use".

To some extent the "type" is simply about trying to limit/standardize the number of possible "verbs" to start a commit headline with, in which case Conventional Commits made the mistake of mixing verbs and nouns (fix and refactor are verbs but feature and chore are nouns) and adding distracting punctuation where English prefers none between the Verb and its direct object in a "Verb the thing" sentence. "Verb: the thing" only ever really looks awkward.

But also do we really want to limit the possible number of verbs that a headline sentence can start with when making commits? "Fix" and "Prevent" may often act like synonyms but there are connotative differences. In some cases "Prevent" may be a shorter way to explain why something needed to be fixed in a headline because "prevent" also says "stop a thing from happening that wasn't supposed to happen" whereas "fix" alone may not yield that extra context. The top line of a commit should be a short and sweet headline and sometimes the cleanest way to do that is to use the full gamut of English verbs at your disposal to tell the right story as quickly as possible.

For GH issues you can always navigate back to the PR discussion (which should have linked issues and other pointers in it) from the commit.

Of course when we switched to GH issues, we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted. Now all those JIRA tags are entirely useless.

IMO that actually argues for tight coupling between your issue tracker and your git repo. And what you really want is portability (which I don't see how you get other than with tight coupling). Ideally there would be open standardized formats, but as it is, github is the 800# gorilla that defines the format and as long as gitlab and other clones can slurp in github project metadata (or at least PRs) then that effectively gets you closer.

But any way... Fixed, immutable pointers to an Atlassian product that you might not be using in 5 years is not a good policy. I'd sooner accept the policy that the git commits needed to stand entirely on their own and all the information about the "why" of the change needed to be baked into the git commit or the comments in the source (I think that fails, though, since everyone is overly terse in git commits and summarizes issues and loses information--and the back-and-forth dialog in a PR discussion is useful because it contains more than just one person's voice summarizing the reason for the change).