The title is problematic, because the thesis of the article is not that issue trackers are harmful, but that using them for a product development workflow is problematic.

I’m going to call them bug trackers from here on, because I don’t like the name “issue”, which I find an insipid term that’s kinda part of the problem.

Generalising and simplifying (to the point of at least mild inaccuracy), bug trackers are excellent in open source work, but work trackers and planners are more useful in business.

Also a remark of my own: bug and work trackers both have a painful tendency to slowly increase in scope and try to cover each other’s purposes, but poorly. They’re similar, and there’s definitely some overlap, but they’re quite different in how you treat them, most of all in how you maintain them. An automatic stale bot may be reasonable in a work tracker (though it’s not ideal), but has absolutely no place in a bug tracker. (I have various comments on HN up to +76, and one outlier at +283, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274146, showing that lots of people agree with me in hating stale bots on bug trackers.)

Actually, what am I saying? Not just such trackers, not even just software, but human endeavour in general tends to scope creep and the problems that arise from it.