I just realised that I may have been thinking about JIRA tickets (or whatever other tool you use) wrong.
The natural instinct of a developer is to seek to fix problems. See a problem - create a ticket and solve. But what to do when the problem is so large and systemic that it cannot reasonably be solved, no small steps exist to make things better? Then you get this ticket that festers. Frankly, at this point the ticket needs to be closed.

Focus on solutions you can implement, not problems that loom over you.