First - and I know this is immaterial - there's something sad about the announcement being clearly 100% AI-generated and then bemoaning AI and calling for a renewed human connection. Like, we want to have a community, but no one is willing to do the work.
Second, BUGTRAQ existed because it had no alternatives. There was no social media, vulnerability research orgs had no marketing teams, there were no commercial clearinghouses, etc. Today, what's the incentive to use a mailing list? Case in point: two other security mailing lists, fulldisclosure@seclists.org and oss-security@lists.openwall.com, still exist but get relatively little use.
Bugtraq had ceased being relevant at least a decade before it was shut down; it's kind of hard to see what place it could hold now. When it started, vulnerability research was a tiny niche, and disclosure was still a live debate; the norms today are totally different.
Yet today, there's not many places to find open discussion and disclosures that otherwise would have seen the light of day in this age of "ethical hacking".
Second, BUGTRAQ existed because it had no alternatives. There was no social media, vulnerability research orgs had no marketing teams, there were no commercial clearinghouses, etc. Today, what's the incentive to use a mailing list? Case in point: two other security mailing lists, fulldisclosure@seclists.org and oss-security@lists.openwall.com, still exist but get relatively little use.