As much as this is overly simplistic, there's a sort of appeal here..

The good news when you have proper issue management is that you don't lose any issues. The bad news is you don't lose any issues.

In my work, the issue tracker has issues that are over 5 years old. Any time someone dares to just purge those, some one comes out of the woodwork to suddenly passionately care about this thing they have forgotten for years until the jira notification triggered them.

Projects that have pristine issue discipline tend to suck, as they waste so much energy on things that didn't matter whether or is fixing or engaging in an argument about the value. The better projects tend to say "fine, we will hold that issue in low priority backlog and get to it if we ever run out of better stuff to do", and the submitter is placated and everyone knows we will never run out of better stuff to do.