It takes like two seconds to write a ticket and then tag your commits with it.
You get credit for fixing the issue, avoid giant fix-along-the-way PRs, and future credit for people (maybe even you) understanding why you those changes were made.
Without a ticket, the only people who see that you're working on that thing are the engineers reviewing your code. At many companies, this creates a lot less friction.
To put it a different way: it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. Creating a ticket is like asking permission (as the project managers will see the ticket and start asking questions about why time is being spent on low-priority things). Just going ahead and pushing code is asking forgiveness - sure, someone might notice after the fact that you did some work that you weren't assigned to do, but by that point it will be considered irrelevant, as long as your other responsibilities were handled on-time.
If you've never worked at a company where these political games are necessary - count your lucky stars!
I use MCP for this now.
A crappy form filled ticket by an AI is slightly better than no ticket.
Except then you can get your wrist slapped for starting work on a ticket without prioritization. A rigid enough process slowly kills everything.