It's certainly worth questioning whether it applies to software... I suspect the idea behind your thought is that there is no inventory cost to issues since they are just a few bits on a hard drive somewhere.
But I'm not so sure that's true. Every minute that passes after a bug report has costs: the reporter's memory slowly degrades making it harder to reconstruct the triggering scenario. The software itself slowly drifts away from the state the bug was filed in, adding questions about whether it's still applicable. And recent changes to the codebase that might have triggered the bug also slowly fade from developers' memory. Lastly the larger the bug database is, the harder it is to search and the slower de-duping becomes.
In a real sense the value of the report decreases AND the cost of addressing it increases over time.