You certainly won't find me arguing against that change, and the conservatism is why I called it borderline. The only reason I bring it up is because of the "absolute non-negotiable" bit, which I took to probably indicate a very exacting standard lest it include most widespread languages anyways.

Yes, I think it's also a good example of how "absolute" backwards compatibility is not necessarily a good thing. Not only was the old loopvar behavior probably the biggest noob trap in Go (*), it turned out not to be what anyone writing Go code in the wild actually wanted, even people experienced with the language. Everyone seems to have: a) assumed it always worked the way it does now, b) wrote code that wasn't sensitive to it in the first place, or c) worked around it but never benefitted from it.

*: strongest competitor for "biggest noob trap" IMO is using defer in a loop/thinking defer is block scoped