On the other hand, most issues rot due to process overhead, not because the ticket is hard.

For example, why are you working on a four-year-old issue, and a trivial one at that, when you're already behind schedule on the tasks assigned to you? Now someone else who has their own things to get done has to review it? And even trivial changes can be annoying to truly review beyond a blind LGTM.

Just one of the many ways that pressure builds against the utopia of burning through old tickets.

Aside, watch out for the double standard we have for AI on forums like this. AI is expected to be so good that it can magically overcome the forces that keep engineers from working on old tickets (which were never related to engineer productivity) and, when AI can't, well of course it couldn't because AI sucks.