I think the biggest dragon to slay would be the legendary GTK issue #233 which has been open for 15 years and has become sort of a meme by now. So many people try to solve it but fail since it requires intricate knowledge of the framework.
After reading an issue like that I would be very hard pressed to motivate myself to contribute anything.
Given that no one stepped up to do it yet and random users chimed in with aggressive and/or unhelpful noise, locking the issue was adequate.
I find it concerning how much abuse GNOME devs get, and I can completely understand that they respond like this.