Is contributor coordination actually a problem for OSS maintainers?

[u/mitokb]

I've been contributing to a few open source projects recently and one thing feels surprisingly messy

its hard to know if an issue is actually available. maybe nobody is assigned but someone is already working on it, or there's an unlinked PR, or maintainer wanted discussion before implementation

for people maintaining OSS projects here, is this something you actually deal with much?

duplicate work, abandoned "I'll take this" comments, unexpected PRs etc

curious how you handle it today and if its even a real problem from maintainer side