The backlog was always a credit card
An engineer putting a piece of work on their backlog is effectively deferring it to never. It’s important enough to write it down somewhere and document that it exists as a bug or a feature enhancement, but it’s not important enough to act.
Yes, sometimes we ambitiously carve out time to “burn down the backlog”, but do you know what we pick from that list? We pick the interesting work. Interesting to code or interesting because of the impact on the feature. Some kind of interesting briefly elevates this work to relevance. The boring backlog work? You couldn’t pay me.
I’ve avoided keeping backlogs for most of my career because they behave like debt. You put the task on the card, feel good about not losing it, then pay interest every day you don’t do it. Grooming, triage, scrolling past the same broken link for the ninth month: all payment, none of it touching the principal.
Handing the list to an agent changes what the list is for. A backlog became a graveyard because writing work down was cheap and doing it was expensive. Close that gap and it’s a queue again. I still don’t want to keep one, but I’m less sure what I hated was the list rather than the price of acting on it.
Backlog work is work you've decided not to do. Now there's someone willing to do it.