The saltstack quality/release cycle may be the cause of some of the pileup.
I experienced a minor issue with saltstack recently and submitted a new issue. Turns out the saltstack devs had already addressed the issue, but the fix was staged for release weeks later. Between the time I reported my issue and the release of 2017.7.3 this week, my issue was marked as related to a half dozen reports of the behavior in different circumstances.
While regression testing is a good thing your infrastructure software is a Good Thing, the process of staging known bug fixes will tend to multiple the number of open issues as multiple users report their findings.
