Easy bugs might exist at small and medium size companies, but when you are a $1T+ company, there is no such thing as an easy fix. Your change could have unforeseen side effects that take down some critical revenue-generating service that causes us to lose $millions. It's got to go through multiple code reviews, have unit and integration tests written, be able to show those test passing more than once, it may need to get reviewed by legal, it may need to get reviewed by security and privacy teams. And tons of other process overhead I'm not even recalling. Just getting a one-liner from an engineer's fingertips properly deployed into production could take months.
Whether or not you fix a bug weighs on the scale against the cost of all of the above things, the cost of time, the cost of these people's attention, and the opportunity cost of them doing something else. And these costs tend to not scale with the size of the pull request. They're fixed costs that have to be paid no matter how small an issue is.
I work at a BigCo, and occasionally get comments from developer friends about "Hey, why doesn't BigCo fix this obvious bug I reported! It's simple! Why are you guys so incompetent??" I look at the bug internally, and it's either 1. got a huge internal comment chain showing it's not as simple as an outsider would think, or 2. it's indeed trivial, but the effort to fix it does not outweigh the costs I outlined above.
> or 2. it's indeed trivial, but the effort to fix it does not outweigh the costs I outlined above
And if you devote a whole team to simple fixes, those costs stop being a blocker. So I still like the idea.
And maybe those costs are justified at scale, but what comes with that is your small bugs affecting tons of users, so they shouldn't be ignored for scale-based reasons.
Whether or not you fix a bug weighs on the scale against the cost of all of the above things, the cost of time, the cost of these people's attention, and the opportunity cost of them doing something else. And these costs tend to not scale with the size of the pull request. They're fixed costs that have to be paid no matter how small an issue is.
I work at a BigCo, and occasionally get comments from developer friends about "Hey, why doesn't BigCo fix this obvious bug I reported! It's simple! Why are you guys so incompetent??" I look at the bug internally, and it's either 1. got a huge internal comment chain showing it's not as simple as an outsider would think, or 2. it's indeed trivial, but the effort to fix it does not outweigh the costs I outlined above.