I'm always surprised to see bugs like this where an extremely easy to test part of the spec just seemingly isn't tested and ends up as a bug that never gets fixed until many years later.
The way I've seen it implemented at a small company I worked at before was to explicitly endorse the "20% time" idea that Google made famous, where you may choose your own priorities for a fraction of your working time regardless of the bug tracker priority order. Even if in practice you don't actually have that spare time allocated in your schedule, it does give you some cover to tell your manager why you are prioritizing little UI papercuts over product features this week.
This is a perfect expression of something I like to call Chesterton's Inertia. It's exactly the same as Chesterton's Fence.
What happens is that there is a mess on the floor, and somebody walks around it, maybe just because they were in a hurry, or maybe they didn't even see it. Somebody else walks in, maybe doesn't even notice the mess, just notices the faint trail that the last person left, and follows it. The next person walks in, sees a mess, and sees a trod path around the mess, and follows the path.
Years later, the path has been paved, has signage posted that doesn't refer to the mess, and has walls blocking the mess from sight. The mess has fused with the ground it used to just sit on, and is partially being used to support the wall. Every once in a while, someone asks why there's a weird bend in the path that makes no sense, and a old hand who's been around since the beginning tells him that the bend is a fence, and not for you to understand.