this doesn't seem good attitude for critical software like database
Seatback entertainment in aircraft are not critical. Aircraft are.
In Postgres, there are plenty low-priority, low-impact bugs. #16265, for instance, reports that the capitalization of a relation in an error message is confusing. The report got mostly ignored. And that seems not a great loss.
Dare I say, solving every bug does not make economic sense.
Until it is. Swiss Air Flight 111 went down with 229 lives lost because of a new infotainment system whose electrical cables started sparkling.
Yes, not every part of a critical system is critical. Determining which is which is a complicated task, though, as parts interact. Not too long ago (and by this I mean within my lifetime), we were ignorant enough about our own bodies to think that our microbiota was almost irrelevant to our health and that bad teeth were mostly a cosmetic problem.
Back to IT, Heartbleed was caused by addition of a feature that looked as harmless as you could think of. But it wasn't.
Judging real critical-ness of bugs is hard. Yeah, capitalization of an error message is likely harmless, but I would treat, say, any buffer overflow as serious.
[0] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/c22286ad6268347c6...
why would the optimal amount of bugs be anything less for a database?
In which case maybe leaving them alone is practical?
I love fixing bugs, but your post triggered this thought so I thought I'd share.