I'm not really sure how to reply to this. The first thing that's worth mentioning is that Emacs isn't simply in "maintenance" mode. There is a nice steady flow

I'm not really sure how to reply to this. The first thing that's worth mentioning is that Emacs isn't simply in "maintenance" mode. There is a nice steady flow of new features, significant features too such as Elisp native compilation and Wayland support. It's also important to keep in mind the sheer scale of Emacs. Vanilla Emacs ships over 1 million lines of Elisp (I'm getting 1.3m according to a small shell script). Considering just how massive of a scale this is, 3000 bugs is really not so bad.