Oh! I am just realizing the moderators group has nobody in it! Now I understand why a PM I wrote to @moderators a couple weeks ago never got a response.. 
I had created that as part of my idea to have a softer, gentler approach to moderation here. It’s important to have a single point of contact where you can reach a moderator and know you’re going to get a response. I hope the decision to remove that is reconsidered.
Also as part of trying to be kinder, gentler, I tried my best to avoid using “time wasting” as a reason for moderator decisions. I don’t think well intentioned community leaders who are trying to help keep discussions tidy should be made to feel bad about that.
Returning to the OP… I had a regular todo to review and clean up older topics, and it was a good manual task because there were often loose ends I was able to tie up along the way. Sometimes topics could just be deleted or they could be merged etc. But it is a gargantuan task and I only made it back a few years.
I’d be in favor of allowing trusted veterans like @nathank to add the tags rather than making them flag the topics for review by staff, especially right now when there is no community manager or devoted moderation team.
Edit: still have the links in my sidebar! This was to see topics that are open, unsolved, and over a week old. Still find these links helpful to see how well we are doing at getting topics resolved. Maybe more of us could help out with this if staff don’t have time to do it.