I don't think there's any defense to this. If you look through the open issues you find stale issues, feature requests with no planned work, already resolved issues left open, "we'll get to it in a couple of releases", etc. Nobody is managing the queue.
I know it's a big corporate product, but this is a sign of bad project management, imho. At the very least they could offer to let a community member go through and clean it up if they won't do it themselves.
It's only bad project management if you believe every issue from every rando on the Internet should be given equal attention. An open issue tracker is a poor metric for project health.
IOW, it's popular open source, the Github issue tracker is going to have a lot of noise. What would a community member do that the stale bot isn't doing? What open source project comparable to Kubernetes' scope and interest has an open tracker that exemplifies what you seek?
They have a bot which cleans up inactive stuff, marking it as stale, eventually closing issues stale with no activity. Anything worth keeping open is re-opened or a maintainer will tell the bot to un-mark it as stale.
I know it's a big corporate product, but this is a sign of bad project management, imho. At the very least they could offer to let a community member go through and clean it up if they won't do it themselves.