I'm reacting from a place of emotion here but your suggested approach just doesn't scale for an open-source project. Nothing is more soul-destroying than an ever growing backlog. If people don't care enough to follow up with an easy reproducible case or even open the PR to fix themselves then they have no right to squat the backlog.
Sure for commercial situations you expect the customer to sign off on a fix but a maintainer's responsibility in open source is exactly 0. Even having a bug tracker is an affordance from the maintainer, GitHub supports turning issues off.
I'm going to continue to terminate old issues where the problem described was vague or the reporter has gone AWOL and I would encourage all OSS maintainers out there to do the same, let's manage expectations.
Sure for commercial situations you expect the customer to sign off on a fix but a maintainer's responsibility in open source is exactly 0. Even having a bug tracker is an affordance from the maintainer, GitHub supports turning issues off.
I'm going to continue to terminate old issues where the problem described was vague or the reporter has gone AWOL and I would encourage all OSS maintainers out there to do the same, let's manage expectations.