Most of the time, there isn't any reason to believe it could be fixed, i.e. there were not any non-trivial changes around that area. What you're describing happens less frequently, and in such cases, the devs should discuss that with the reporter.

In this specific example, it looks like Apple gave no indications that such changes had happened, and no indications they had even spent a nonzero amount of effort following the reproduction instructions with either the old code or the new code.