It’s more than that though. Once the list is sorted, the next time you come back to it, the list is still more or less in the right priority. So the work for prioritization becomes easier.
Issues only come into play when your understanding is wrong, to serve as a reminder to revisit your assumptions. New features don't fit. If you are spending so much time finding features to develop faster than you can develop them, your human resource allocation is flawed.
Another goal that would frequently appear is paying tech debt. Some changes are also more important than other in that track.
All this work has business value and may be part of the BAU of a established business. I think you're describing a business in a very primordial state. Although, even in startups I've created having a list of things we wanted to do was helpful. We saw our competition we wanted to do better, but we also need to catch up. Lots of things are just obvious and not all the work one does is revolutionary. I don't disagree that changes do occur, though.