> Yet here we were, and I'd wasted a bunch of time convinced that a support ticket was not the right way to go.

From my experiences with public issue trackers for big projects, it's very reasonable to postpone creating a new issue, and rather follow my own hypothesis/solution first:

* creating a new issue takes significant effort to be concise, provide examples, add annotated screenshots, follow the reporting template, etc., in hopes of convincing the project members that the issue is worth their time.

Failing to do so often results in project members not understanding or misunderstanding the problem, and all too often leads to them directly closing the issue.

And even when reporting a well-written issue, it can still just be ignored/stall, and be autoclosed by GitHubBot.