We implemented Initiatives as soon as we moved to Premium. Our sizing guidelines are such as Stories and similar issue types at that level can be done within a sprint (or appx 2 weeks), Epics can be done with 1 quarter/3 months (1 PI if you're running SAFe), and an Initiative is something > 3 months. The advantage is that is allows our value streams to organize their work better and create high level roadmaps that rollup to a single large piece of work, even if it's delivered across multiple teams or value streams.
The hierarchies above Epic need to be created from Plans, and so they behave like portfolio issue types and not core Jira software issue types. So the only thing I would say is a "disadvantage" is that once a project allows those higher issue types to be created, they don't play well in the Jira boards. Epics, for example, have a place on the backlog and they can get neatly tucked away into the Epics panel. Initiatives or other hierarchy items start to get in the way and so you have to manually filter them out of your boards and manage them on dedicated boards.
Additionally, creating the relationship between the Initiative & child Epics has always been awkward. In other issue types, you can create the child item straight from the parent (top down). However, with Initiatives the only way to create the parent/child relationship was from the Epic (bottom up). You would need to leverage the Parent field and find the Initiative name or key and create the link there. Good news is that I read a feature is coming soon (or maybe just rolled out last month) to finally fix this and allow child epics to be created for hierarchy levels above epic.
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