Story time. I used to work for Facebook (and Google) and lots of games were played around bugs.

At some point the leadership introduced an SLA for high then medium priority bugs. Why? because bugs would sit in queues for years. The result? Bugs would often get downgraded in priority at or close to the SLA. People even wrote automated rules to see if their bugs filed got downgraded to alert them.

Another trick was to throw it back to the user, usually after months, ostensibly to request information, to ask "is this still a problem?" or just adding "could not reproduce". Often you'd get no response. sometimes the person was no longer on the team or with the company. Or they just lost interest or didn't notice. Great, it's off your plate.

If you waited long enough, you could say it was "no longer relevant" because that version of the app or API had been deprecated. It's also a good reason to bounce it back with "is still this relevant?"

Probably the most Machiavellian trick I saw was to merge your bug with another one vaguely similar that you didn't own. Why? Because this was hard to unwind and not always obvious.

Anyone who runs a call center or customer line knows this: you want to throw it back at the customer because a certain percentage will give up. It's a bit like health insurance companies automatically sending a denial for a prior authorization: to make people give up.

I once submitted some clear bugs to a supermarket's app and I got a response asking me to call some 800 number and make a report. My bug report was a complete way to reproduce the issue. I knew what was going on. Somebody simply wanted to mark the issue as "resolved". I'm never going to do that.

I don't think you can trust engineering teams (or, worse, individuals) to "own" bugs. They're not going to want to do them. They need to be owned by a QA team or a program team that will collate similar bugs and verify something is actually fixed.

Google had their own versions of things. IIRC bugs had both a priority and s everity for some reason (they were the same 99% of the time) between 0 and 4. So a standard bug was p2/s2. p0/s0 was the most severe and meant a serious user-facing outage. People would often change a p2/s2 to p3/s3, which basically meant "I'm never going to do this and I will never look at it again".

I've basically given up on filing bug reports because I'm aware of all these games and getting someone to actually pay attention is incredibly difficult. So much of this comes down to stupid organizational-level metrics about bug resolution SLAs and policies.