There doesn't appear to be any medium here but I have a Kanban board in Jira and all issues are assigned to an Epic. The filter specifically does not include Epics because in Kanban if Epics are included in the filter Jira adds them to the list of work (undesired in my case.) In Agile boards, the Epics do not appear in the backlog.
This is the bahavior I want, however, if I remove epics from the filter, it will not show the Epic tags on the Kanban board. The Jira documentation mentions the only fix for this is to include Epics in the board filter. Is there any workaround to this? Is it possible to create another type of Agile board that does not show Epics but also is not running off of sprints? It's highly annoying that this is an all or nothing thing. It doesn't make sense they have functionality for one board but not the other. Perhaps another type of sprint-less board will work?