The established culture on a lot of projects is that you open an issue, and then you have to keep pinging it every week otherwise the stale bot closes it with "this issue is stale, closing, but your contribution is very important to us".
I quite like pi and learned about the contribution guidelines a while after using it. Hard to complain about people making software for free using a process that works for them.
I will say having a project with a slim issue tracker that only contains things the maintainers have blessed (and thus presumably are more likely to get worked on) is pretty nice.
If you’re googling for a bug your hitting and come across and auto closed issue, you know you have to submit a higher quality issue to get it looked at, rather than just +1ing the existing lacking issue.
It's crap either way.