That annoys the crap out of me. Closing stale issues doesn’t make the issues go away, it just means that edge cases aren’t addressed. If I have an issue and find myself in a stale-closed issue, I’m not even going to bother reporting it. I’m either going to look for a different library altogether, one that actually tries to solve edge cases; or I’m going to create my own library as a big middle-finger to the project. At work, I’ll just open a new issue, which will probably just be ignored.

Yeah, I stopped reporting issues to projects when I have seen tons of stale bot closed issues. Those were real bugs, still really in the codebase, just no one fixed it for arbitrary short time.

And arguably we’re where we are because people have this idea that issue counts are comparable between projects.

I see this way of thinking around CVEs too. I think it’s a mistake of making data-driven decisions based on noise rather than signals. It sounds good when you have a comparative number to go on.

I see open issues as a pretty good signal that people are using the software and people care about its development, but maybe the number of contributors is too small. In these cases, I might even open the PR myself. Issues without replies though is probably the worst signal you can send as a maintainer. Closing issues without replying and letting a stale bot passively aggressively close issues is probably tied, but it’s usually hidden away.