We did releases that were only bug fixes and maintenance. There can be a long tail of bugs in a complex system, most of which are relatively harmless and only occur in very rare situations; it’s hard to justify fixing these when paying customers are asking for a new feature.

Also you’d be surprised at what gets classified as a bug when you apply this.

Ultimately though, everybody does this. Critical bugs get fixed first. Anything too far down the backlog de-facto doesn’t get fixed. I like the intellectual honesty that this approach brings, in that it forces you to set a bar for bugs not worth fixing and consequently marking them as won’t fix.

Final note: whether a bug is worth fixing changes over time. Maybe your best engineer can’t find it after two weeks. Maybe your biggest customer just ran into it. Maybe you can’t reproduce it. Maybe the platform causing it got acquired by Google.

Can it work? Yes, but it doesn’t look very different to what you’re probably already doing in practice.