Which vulnerability do I fix first when the list never ends?

You know how to patch, how to scan, how to close a hole. That was never the hard part. The hard part is standing in front of two hundred open items and deciding which one earns your next hour. Here is what trips you: you are treating the list as the problem. It is not. The list is just reality. The problem is that you have no rule for choosing, so every item argues its own case, and you listen to all of them at once. That is not prioritizing. That is being pulled. Fix the rule, not the list. You do not need to read every ticket to know what matters. You need to know, cold, what you are defending — and then ask only one question of anything new: does this threaten that, and how fast.