When you think about it, triage in medicine is also not an ideal solution. Ideally, in both medicine and law, the system would have enough capacity to deal with everyone in strict first-in-first-out order without anyone being harmed. In the absence of that capacity, we have to decide which cases to look at first somehow, and FIFO doesn't appear to be the best basis for making that decision.

We need more judges too, but even if we were to somehow force legislators to select them this instant, some cases would end up getting dropped before the backlog got caught up. I'd much prefer that they were things like solicitation, small-amount drug posession, and minor traffic violations—not petty theft if we can help it, since that isn't a victimless crime, but I'd nevertheless rather have ten petty theft cases dropped than one assault case that landed someone in the hospital.

It's a flawed solution for a flawed world.