Sorry you’re surprised. Issues are filed at about a rate of 1 per day against GLib. Merge requests at a rate of about 1 per 2 days. Each issue or merge request takes a minimum of about 30 minutes (across at least 2 people) to analyse, put together a fix, test it, review it, fix it, review it and merge it. I’d estimate the average is closer to 3 hours than 30 minutes. Even at the fastest rate, it would take 3 working months to clear the backlog of ~1000 issues. I get a small proportion of my working time to spend on GLib (not full time).

Age of a ticket is completely irrelevant as anyone can request anything but the number of developers is limited. If you'd like to see something implemented, please consider providing a patch. Thanks!

Even if the damned thing would be really helpful in the long run, I can't give it the time and attention needed to make it work again ...  Not right now. And ultimately never.

You can afford to make a proper PR to upstream.

you honestly don’t have the time to decide which of these options is better.