Why is pg_restore returning successfully but not actually restoring my database?

This is still confusing, I attempted to execute this thing that the --dbname should be the db I want to create.

pg_restore --create --exit-on-error --verbose --dbname=jiradb jiradb.tar

WRONG!!

It should literally be --dbname=postgres, the --create then will create the real db from the name in the file. In my case, I restored from a tar backup with

pg_restore --create --exit-on-error --verbose --dbname=postgres jiradb.tar

You have to add the name of a valid database to initially connect to or it will just dump the contents to STDOUT:

pg_restore --create --exit-on-error --verbose --dbname=postgres <backup_file>