At risk of being the messenger who gets shot....
As an outsider, it seems very reasonable to me to file a bug against the issue tracker for a project whose code I think should be changed. For better or worse, this is the way that 99% of software projects work. Expecting everyone in the community to know that they _shouldn't_ be filing bugs against the issue tracker is a losing battle. I'm more hooked in than most, and even I didn't know this.
I can empathize with things not being done the way you'd like to be, but the claim that things happening on the GHC tracker are done "in private" is silly. The gitlab tracker is 10x more accessible, and the lack of community engagement on the mailing lists speaks volumes.
And besides, nobody wants to be on a mailing list anyway. It's a terrible experience with weird branching and no persistence, and while there are archives, it's an extremely unpleasant thing to try to spelunk through.
Best,
Sandy