Say, I have some 6286 JIRA Tickets of some type (Test Case) in a project (MCAL)

When I search for matching labels, I get the right count (I know as I created only 14 of them)

But, this shall mean that 6286 - 14 = 6272 Issues do not have this one label which I want to exclude.
However, searching for them only yields ~1781 issues

Trying to negate the query with `... NOT labels = <label>`, `... labels NOT IN (<label>)`, `... NOT labels = <label>`, all of these have returned the same count of 1781 as shown.
I am on JIRA v9.12.13 release. Please check the case and suggest on what is wrong with the above was to search for the issues without a given label?