Take Firefox’s 1542044, where the dark mode theme colors aren’t exposed when they should. The patch has been up for 4 years.
Or, take this, which is part of a series that added Doxygen parsing to clangd, a language server. It was left unreviewed until late 2022, the patcher went in conversation with the reviewer, but then met radio silence again, long enough to the point where the patch-reviewing service shut down. Clangd currently has only 44 open PRs to review, though it uses the same issue tracker as llvm for some reason.
Aren’t we paying them to do all this?
If you check, there are lots of recently accepted patches to these projects
There can be lots of reasons, including those involved with background discussions that aren’t in the bug report.
Sometimes it can be due to patches having a massive impact that are difficult to test but only fixes minor things, or they simply aren’t that important.
I wrote a patch for a large project once though that fixed a critical NSIS installer bug when if a specific beta was installed earlier, you couldn’t upgrade (but most people were using the betas). The patch was rejected because they wanted to break it up (but I couldn’t because I needed to eliminate a big loop by converting it to small ones). So I gave up…
Project stopped a while later… But this wasn’t a normal scenario
How much have you donated to these projects? Trust me, some projects REALLY don’t get many donations or volunteers. From my understanding, NTPd (not sure if its still the case), but it was literally being maintained by only 1 person