YDS: Can You Have Too Many Product Backlog Items?

Great post! Thanx. As a SM I need some advice. How should we deal with PBI around technical debt and content product management? The development team proposes items that have to be carried out on an agenda in the future because automation is too large an investment. The products we create are data driven insights of which we provide an update periodically, as soon as all new data from our sources is available. Our customers rely on this update cycle.This is a strong discussion in our Scrum Team.
I hope you can help us.

I've been struggling with maintaining a backlog for 3-5 products, where the product managers want the devs and scrum masters to do the majority of the maintenance. While I fit into the Product Manager role (not the Product Owner), having been a scrum master in the past, I understand the criticality of the PO role in regards to the backlog. As a start-up we have been building out stories for one path forward, and then have the path changed to a different direction fairly often. So we have open PBIs going back nearly to the beginning, which is nearly 1.5 years, with over 650 open PBIs older than 3 months. Some are projects we're still working on and haven't gotten to the issues, others are from the cancelled projects, and still others are from developers who have done the work, but never updated the story (because it wasn't part of the sprint, but they did the work anyway). With the pressure of a start-up to move as quickly as possible, we haven't taken the time to go back and clean up the detritus from these cancelled projects. After listening to your post, I'm taking a more active role in cleaning up old, defunct PBIs.