> So I think it's good advice that maintainers should use stalebot, because the alternative is a dead project.
Why not just close issue tracker? Or autoclose everything immediately rather than remind people weeks/months later about their bug, just to discover that they got "pranked"?
1. Because some issues are still valuable, a well presented bug report that you can immediately act on and is related to parts of the project you want to enhance improves the project.
2. As above, you want to work on some of the valuable issues of interest to you as a maintainer, but if you glance at one and think "that looks like a lot of work" or "that's an x-y problem" or "I'd need to go back and forth 5 times to get enough information to action that" then you can just ignore it and have the bot close it if you never get the motivation, time or energy to go back to it.
3. As I mentioned in my comment, having an ever growing backlog has a genuine detrimental emotional impact that directly causes maintainer burnout.
Why not just close issue tracker? Or autoclose everything immediately rather than remind people weeks/months later about their bug, just to discover that they got "pranked"?
Or let issues pile up? Or have separate garbage dump issue tracker? Done by https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock