Simply could also mean it's thriving. FastAPI has nearly 50k stars. It is very popular and very effective in what it promises. Active repos with similar popularity have way, WAY more issues and pull requests, projects like Apache/echarts, Godot, Redis or Grafana.

Projects with similar stars, momentJS or Jquery don't see much active development have very few issues and pull requests.

Could you clarify what you mean by "collapsing under the weight"?

Will a project be abandoned because users are pointing out ways to improve it? Does work stop at some point because "we can't get to every issue"? Sure, the maintainer could get burned out, but that is not a given.

IIRC FastAPI is built on starlette, can some of these issues belong to them ? just hoping the numbers don't reflect a whole reality.