The problem is, I think, that such threads siphon off the usefulness from the rest of the forum. The fact that someone might say something useful or significant in such a difficult-to-navigate thread is a problem because the information is then made relatively inaccessible.
That takes effort. Effort that could presumably instead have been spent making awesome contributions to the Julia ecosystem, etc.
Isn’t that more suited to Slack or Zulip?
I think that’s making the assumption that these conversations are inevitable and what doesn’t get brought up here will necessarily have been brought up as a new topic. Often these useful conversations only happen because there is less social friction to responding with an example in a thread like this than creating a new topic. The fact that we have so many instances of important discussions happening in unrelated threads can just as easily be interpreted as those threads being necessary to spark discussions that we wouldn’t otherwise be having.
I agree - archiving stuff, by making updates impossible via locking, can really change an evergreen thread like this, or an a focused discussion on a fast changing subject, into a stale conversation that fades away collecting dust. This is a good example of a thread that I feel adds value from being open, with minimal harm.
But note that those threads are constructive, while topics like this one usually degenerate to kvetching about Julia, with the useful stuff lost in the noise.
I’d say that the kvetching was pretty constructive, in view of Subtype: Fix some diagonal rule related false alarm by N5N3 · Pull Request #53034 · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub (via the split-off Intransitivities in subtyping , but the initial example is not due to me, it is due to @rafael.guerra upthread here, in the very post that necroed this thead after a 2 year gap)
Big props to @nsajko for picking that kvetching up into a real bug report and to @N5N3 for the (probably partial?) fix! 
That was not kvetching, it was a gem fortunately not lost in the noise.
Additional discussion about closing threads with a time limit should happen here where the idea was thoroughly discussed.
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If anyone has anymore WATs, please create a new topic referencing this one describing the WAT. I have also created a wat tag that can be used on WAT topics.