“We'll fix it if customers complain."
You can’t fix everything, and perfect is the enemy of good. While punting testing to users is a no-no, recognizing that edge case issues can be deprioritized is crucial to getting things out the door. This means shipping stuff with known defects that you can respond to if necessary.
Oh, you certainly can't.
But you can choose how many things needing fixing you will make. Doing some shit without thinking and waiting for people to complain about symptoms of deep issues is a very effective way to create lots and lots of need for fixing things.
while True:
ship_feature()
if bugs:
to_fix = highest_priority(bugs)
fix = make_patch(to_fix)
fix = introduce_new_bug(fix)
# defer bugs[1:] until they meet the complaint criteria
Doing this means you make decisions early and don't carry a ton of historical baggage that gets endlessly discussed.
There are morale and duplicate bug issues with keeping a backlog that grows faster than you can close them, so I guess that makes a bit of sense. And better than GitHub auto-shooting-the-messenger by clocking bugs after a month or two of inactivity.
But you can fix a lot. Some of the products I've worked at had Sentry alerts all the time that nobody paid attention to, whereas others (of very similar complexity) had them a few times a week, and every time somebody would immediately get on top of it and release a hotfix, usually in a span of the same day.
(edit: note I am OP)