If you get on someone’s nerves and fail to resolve it in a short period of time, the closure after that becomes close to pointless. You might mistaken that a simple sorry after a few weeks will suffice but more often than not that is just an icebreaker.
When the awkward situation takes time, we will form our own judgement of what actually happens and decide whether we want to forgive or move on shortly after. This is how a healthy mindset works.
If you berate someone in public for something they did, then accept an apology years later, you have already forgiven this person long before, but just tied your own ego to the apology. And if you don’t accept the apology regardless, you have decided you will be grudgeful anyway. This is an example of a typical troll on the internet.
Make a closure as soon as you realise your mistake. Beyond that repair is not up to you but up to the other persons internal resolution mechanism.