There's a huge difference between closing and locking issues. If you close an issue, people can still leave follow-up comments, and the issue can be re-opened

There's a huge difference between closing and locking issues. If you close an issue, people can still leave follow-up comments, and the issue can be re-opened if warranted. Some of the best issues on GitHub are closed issues where people have come in months or years after the fact and left useful additional information. Locking an issue leads to tons of duplication, annoying UX, and an overall hostile experience. In the 10,000+ issues I've managed on my own repos over the years, I've locked a grand total of ONE issues and that was just due to some borderline harassment (though unintended) that was going on long after useful discourse was over.