They worked well for us

Yeah. I used story points successfully for years.

After learning about the above data, I asked my team to trial just counting tickets for velocity, and it also works fine.

The outcomes weren't noticably different, so now we just don't spend the couple hours each sprint that estimating story sizes was costing us.

My team was hesitant to give up story point estimation, because they didn't want to give up the communication with leadership about which stories were XXL.

So we kept using the XXL issue tag, but dropped the rest of the estimation process.