I know that I for one steer people away from projects where serious bugs go unfixed for a long time. I have very little incentive to follow up on them once I’ve switched tools.

The correlation between bugs that matter a great deal to me and bugs I don’t respond to is much greater than zero.

If you delete all the bugs that caused people to abandon your platform then you are cutting off your own nose.

Can’t reproduce is a better metric but only if it’s other users rather than the maintainers. I find that a lot of people who write buggy code also are bad at reproducing issues (which I think is why they have bugs in the first place. Lack of imagination or rigor or both).