Possibly worse is those small bugs that would just take a few hours to fix but never get prioritized, yet they still get pulled up for discussion week after week during whole team grooming-meetings. "what is this bug again?" Accumulating a total of more admin-time than solution time.
A bug left alone long enough grows from an child bug to an adult bug. You're still caring, feeding, and maintaining that bug the entire time.
I think the oldest bug I've raised that's still open is this Webkit one from 2008 [1]. It still gets plaintive comments from various people every few years. A few more and it'll be going off to college.
> We are fixing in Blink (c2103)
That's no help for Safari. Personally I haven't needed to care about Safari in half a decade, but presumably others still do.
Issues for those teams usually 'best effort' isolation going forward, which compounds the issue.