And npm had 2166 at the time they archived their old GitHub repo, moved over to npm-cli (with issues disabled), and have all their issues in a Discourse forum,

And npm had 2166 at the time they archived their old GitHub repo, moved over to npm-cli (with issues disabled), and have all their issues in a Discourse forum, so you can't get an overall count, nor any connection to PRs and commits. So I'm not sure you can glean too much from just looking at an issue count in isolation.