"Temporary" can be an awfully long time. There is ample evidence that discovery rate of bugs (many of which can be bucketed into vulnerabilities) in any non-trivial piece of software is more or less stable.[0] In a recent podcast episode the ex-CISO of Adobe commented that every now and then they'd take a sustained squeeze to find all occurrences of a given type of bug (ie. source of vulnerability) in a codebase. They'd find a good amount of them and fix them.

Then a year or two later they'd repeat the operation and they'd find about the same amount of same types of bugs. In many occasions in code that had been in place in the previous round and had remained essentially untouched.

Paraphrasing what the Gruqg has quipped - a large piece of software has infinity bugs. Infinity minus N is still infinity.

0: Discovery rate with regards to the time spent looking for bugs. LLM-powered bug hunting has amped up the speed with which code bases can be investigated.