From the introduction, your paper seems like a counterproposal: support closures, just not the way others propose. But the paper seems to accept that closures / nested functions, supported at the language level directly, are a "good thing" for C specifically. I disagree with that. When and how has it become the consensus?

At the moment there is no consensus for anything related to this. But most people agree that closures are a good thing because they make certain reoccurring programming patterns safer and easier to write. Why do you disagree?