What is the actual difference?

As a maintainers, if you want to be be able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions, you still gave to read them (triage). That's what's taking time.

I don't see how transforming a discussion into an issue is less effort than the other way around. Both are a click.

Github's issues and discussions seem the same feature to me (almost identical UI with different naming).

The only potential benefit I can see is that discussions have a top-level upvote count.

> If you spend more time closing issues than creating them manually from discussions, the math adds up.

The math is even better if you just ignore all issues and close them after two weeks for being stale!

Wish this was /s but it isn't.

Why do you say that? Curl (arguably one of the most used open source software in the world) currently has 5 open issues https://github.com/curl/curl/issues