It's not exactly what an NPS score of -83 means, but it's close enough and an NPS score of -83 is sufficiently awful that it should be considered a crisis for any business that does not have strong customer lock in. Actually a few promoters in the sample would potentially imply that more than 83% of engineers would advise against JIRA.
Of course NPS scores overlook some nuances. It's a single estimate of a complicated space. The imprecision is probably to its advantage. The goal is not to be perfect (no single number could do that), but to provide a quick estimate of quality with a single question (nobody wants to fill out a 3 page survey, and the executive team is only going to sit and listen for a single statistic).
As an exercise, consider how you chose a restaurant based on a standard Yelp 1-5 scale: you might find that you are using a similar methodology while reading product/service review. Ratings of 1-3 are considered bad reviews, 4s are decent and 5s are good. American culture as a strong bias for positive affect so a 3 is considered to be unfavorable. Additionally, there is a lot of variance in terms of how people get upset and express their anger. Someone may rate something as a 1 because they are more expressive of their angry, while another person rates it as a 3, but neither is really happy with the service. Try coming up with a better metric based on yelp reviews for restaurants you are familiar with and you might find that NPS does a reasonable approximation of what you have discovered.
Of course NPS scores overlook some nuances. It's a single estimate of a complicated space. The imprecision is probably to its advantage. The goal is not to be perfect (no single number could do that), but to provide a quick estimate of quality with a single question (nobody wants to fill out a 3 page survey, and the executive team is only going to sit and listen for a single statistic).
As an exercise, consider how you chose a restaurant based on a standard Yelp 1-5 scale: you might find that you are using a similar methodology while reading product/service review. Ratings of 1-3 are considered bad reviews, 4s are decent and 5s are good. American culture as a strong bias for positive affect so a 3 is considered to be unfavorable. Additionally, there is a lot of variance in terms of how people get upset and express their anger. Someone may rate something as a 1 because they are more expressive of their angry, while another person rates it as a 3, but neither is really happy with the service. Try coming up with a better metric based on yelp reviews for restaurants you are familiar with and you might find that NPS does a reasonable approximation of what you have discovered.