I don't get it. Is there some cultural context I'm missing?
Triage was a harrowing time at the end of a 3 year release cycle where you make agonizing decisions about which bugs you will NOT fix. Always sad when its your baby that's going to be shipping with a wart, however a bug fix usually introduces an average of 0.25 new bugs so you have to stop somewhere.
If you never worked on traditional shrink wrapped software you may not get a feel for the agony that was triage. I still my remember my first WF (won't fix) bug, which is still there to this day. The worst part about it was you usually already had a fix in hand.
These meetings could get tense at times. Yelling and angry exits weren't uncommon.