I worked there for 3 years as a graduate and I can absolutely agree with this comment, the guilt of knowing my project (which was a failure from start to finish) was funded by taxpayer money drove me away from the company and made me swear to never work at another big consultancy again.
CLI tools for online services like Jira etc. basically amount to an open and documented API which the attitude towards these probably unlikely to be changing anytime soon as you mention.