zdwApple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
I recognize that this is annoying from a user perspective, but I do understand it. Not all bugs are easily reproducible (and even if they are 100% reproducible for the user, it's not always so easy for the developers). Also sometimes you make a change to the code that you think might be in a related area, and so sometimes the most "efficient" thing is just to ask the user to re-test.
When I close an old bug that is not actionable, I do feel bad about it. But keeping the bug open when realistically I can't really do anything with it might be worse.
A company like Apple should have complex enough tools to perfectly capture system state at the time of the bug so that they can reproduce it
That’s easy enough. The hard part is doing so without capturing a bunch of email, messages, and other private data that happens to be in memory at the time.
I should be more precise. Capturing the system state isn’t too hard. Turning that into a reproducer may be quite hard, because of things like you say. There are certainly a lot of bugs that such a capture would make easier to figure out, but it wouldn’t be a panacea.