I was going to tell you why it's not a closure, but fortunately I checked first, and of course, you are right.

I doubt your central assertion that this sort of thing happens all the time though. How many times do you see named subroutines declared inside loops? Almost never. And I have never heard of anyone accidentally creating a closure.

Personally, I find using closures a liberating experience, and since they make some hard things easy, actually reduce bugs.