Every codebase is like this because it's cheap to open tickets and pepper the codebase with TODOs but orders of magnitude more expensive time-wise to actually d

Every codebase is like this because it's cheap to open tickets and pepper the codebase with TODOs but orders of magnitude more expensive time-wise to actually do the work. The method of storing the information and prioritizing the work is irrelevant. You simply don't have enough bandwidth to do it all and some of it simply isn't materially important enough to ever get prioritized.