this seems very inefficient and the opposite of what I assumed. repeated requests take up time on both sides and are not a very good measure of how important something is.

This is how the most of the open-source development works. There are many projects with thousands of issues and PRs. Those that will get most attention, typically gets prioritized.

This is even how closed source development works. If you throw issues in a backlog and never follow up to advocate for it then it will never get done.

it's not perfect but it works.

well, apparently it doesn't.

Well, apparently nobody even noticed for 5 years, so that's 5 years that nobody had to even think about that code.

Nah, people noticed, and then they thought "Linux always has these kind of issues, I'm going back to [whatever other OS]" because 99.9% of users will never even TRY to report a bug.

People just think "that's Linux, it's buggy and we have to live with it"

why bother infering such intent when the obvious answer - that they simply forgot about it with no ill intentions - is right there?

Requiring people to advocate for their changes is not ill-intent. It handles all cases such as forgetting/missing a patch, and disagreement whether something is needed. The point is there's no system in place to track which patches "should ideally be included but weren't for some reason", it's up for the people who need them to push for them.

Quite the opposite. If you “pester” for something, they’ll explicitly reject it.

I didn't say pester, I said advocate for it.

It's the same thing.