Obviously well known?

Guy at PayPal sees post, tells a technical person about it, said person forgets about it. Suddenly PayPal doesn't know about it anymore.

Or a person wants to work on fixing this but a manager says no, because there are other priorities.

Or a person starts working on this, quits, and it gets lost among the things they were working on.

It's so easy for things to get lost in a company, even with all the bug trackers in the world.

Isn't this what support case systems and bug tracking software was meant to do - to track non-closed issues?

yeah, I agree, but I think a lot of us work in similar situations, where bug tracking exists, but there's such inundation of bugs that we can lose track of some.

I guess I have sympathy for the PayPal team in this case. They're working on an extremely large product, with a huge user-base. I would imagine it would be very easy for bugs like this to fall through the cracks even with a "process" in place

That assumes that the manager doesn't insist that bugs of age get closed simply because long-open bugs make for ugly metrics.