It depends a bit in the project and maintainers motivation. However: Many projects swim in a sea of open tickets. Too many for the maintainers to keep an overv

It depends a bit in the project and maintainers motivation. However: Many projects swim in a sea of open tickets. Too many for the maintainers to keep an overview. By auto closing you make it clear to observers that currently this thing likely won't change and by forcing to reopen the maintainers can get users to tell them whether the issue still persists without having to try themselves. Generally there is little worth in keeping many years old tickets open, hiding recent issues while probably not being an issue anymore for whatever reason.