Zero structure just leads to lots of shitty issues that have no information on what version of the software it was against, no reproduction steps, and no stacktrace or debug output. I'm tired of closing issues with "I cant reproduce at all, maybe you're on an old version? Anyway feel free to open a new bug if you ever come up with a reproduction step..."

A simple optional field to include the version number that the issue was being reported against would do wonders for my interaction with users.

And you don't need to include that on your software project, but really if our users can't be bothered to tell us what version they're running, I have many, many other issues to fix which I know are broken in master.

Which I guess is the difference. If you're a small project with few users, then the handful of bug reports you get are useful and you want a zero barrier.

I have literally thousands of bug reports, hundreds of those will be left without ever being fixed (even though they may be perfectly legitimate). I have to triage. If a user is blocked by not being able to tell me what version they are running then that pre-triage of making them not even bother to cut a ticket with bad information is useful because then they don't waste any of my time...