It all stems from the fact that all issues are in this one large pool rather than there being a completely separate list with already vetted stuff that nobody else can write into.
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead.
The rebuke to your comment is right in your comment: "other ticket systems do this by…"
The ticket system does it. As in, it has it built-in and/or well integrated. If GitHub had the same level of integration that other ticket systems achieve with their automation, this'd be a non-issue. But it doesn't, and it's a huge problem.
P.S.: I hate to break it to you, but "I hate to break it to you, but" is quite poor form.
P.S. I didn't ask
I guess it probably leads to higher quality issue descriptions at least, but otherwise this seems pretty dumb and user-hostile.
On repos I maintain, I use an “untriaged” label for issues and I convert questions to discussions at issue triage time.
Absolutely. It's a patch that can achieve a similar result, but it's a patch indeed. A major features of every ticketing system, if not "the" major feature, is the ticket flow. Which should be opinionated. Customizable with the owner's opinion, but opinionated nonetheless. Using labels to cover missing areas in that flow is a clunky patch, in my book.
Speaking for another large open GitHub project:
Absofuckinglutely yes.
I cannot overstate how bad this workflow is. There seems to be a development now in other platforms becoming more popular (gitlab, forgejo/codeberg, etc.) and I hope to god that it either forces GitHub to improve this pile of expletive or makes these "alternate" platforms not be so alternate anymore so we can move off.
As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?