These stories are common in math, e.g. these recently happened to me, a lowly mathematician:

1) Two and a half years with no reply from a journal (not even to emails I sent that I'd like to retract the paper so I could send it somewhere else). Then suddenly they tell me the paper is accepted.

2) One year with no reply. Then, my "anxious" collaborator sends them countless emails and gets redirected from person to person and finally an editor tells us that they decided almost immediately to reject our paper but they didn't tell us because "they hate giving bad news".

These were not top journals like Annals, but decent, prestigious ones, from whom you'd expect some professionalism.