Issues simply don't scale. Using discussions as a filter is a good idea.
If you spend more time closing issues than creating them manually from discussions, the math adds up.
If you spend more time closing issues than creating them manually from discussions, the math adds up.
As a maintainers, if you want to be be able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions, you still gave to read them (triage). That's what's taking time.
I don't see how transforming a discussion into an issue is less effort than the other way around. Both are a click.
Github's issues and discussions seem the same feature to me (almost identical UI with different naming).
The only potential benefit I can see is that discussions have a top-level upvote count.
imo almost all issues are real, including "non-issue" - i think you mean non-bug - "discussions." for example it is meaningful that discussions show a potential documentation feature, and products like "a terminal" are complete when their features are authored and also fully documented or discoverable (so intuitive as to not require documentation).
99% of the audience of github projects are other developers, not non-programmer end users. it is almost always wrong to think of issues as not real, every open source maintainer who gets hung up on wanting a category of issues narrower than the ones needed to make their product succeed winds up delegating their product development to a team of professionals and loses control (for an example that I know well: ComfyUI).
The math is even better if you just ignore all issues and close them after two weeks for being stale!
Wish this was /s but it isn't.