Sort of a recurring theme, I find. They have 600+ issues that have been open for over a year, was hoping they'd drive down the backlog a bit before declaring victory

Go look at any large project, they have 500+/1000+ issues and many are ancient. Chrome, Firefox, you name it. I wouldn't be surprised if many issues have even been solved or need new reproduction steps but there's a difficulty to triaging all the issues as well.

> I wouldn't be surprised if many issues have even been solved or need new reproduction steps

All the ones I'm subscribed to are straight-up feature gaps versus competing IDEs. Though of course, there is significant selection bias to my subscriptions

Yeah I can see that. I probably wouldn't be subscribing to issues that weren't feature requests/gaps very often. Ones that are tied to bugs are the only others that come to mind that I'd subscribe to but just thinking about my own dev experience in various jobs and how even there our internal backlogs of issues would have unclosed, out of date stuff, I think some portion of issues in public projects would be too.