That's why the "easy way to reopen" is so important. Your concern is theoretically valid, but if tickets are usually ignored for years, then it really is a desperate situation for the project whichever way you handle it. You can decide between an endlessly growing list of issues that likely aren't valid anymore, or pissing some users off.

I don't really see why it would be harder to find an existing or similar bug. You should be looking (or rather you should be automatically notified) before/during creating a new ticket for existing tickets describing the problem. If a closed ticket describes the exact problem, you should be finding that too, and then should just be able to use the easy way of reopening if necessary. You should also be able to find the workaround in there if someone posted it.

It's definitely not a beautiful solution, but if you implement something like this, the project is already in a desperate state, there's not too much good choices there anymore.