I don't think you can judge "work needing to be done" by looking at backlog. Tickets are easy to enter. If they were really important, they'd get done or people would be hired to do them (employed or contracted). 10 year old issues that never got attention were just never that important to begin with.
If AI coding improves productivity, it might move us closer to having 2X as much work as we can possibly do instead of 3X.