No, that's not why. If we can understand the English, we edit to fix the English.
We constantly get questions by native English speakers that are nevertheless barely comprehensible. Even when the problem is clearly described, it still needs to meet several other standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/). This is by design.
We aren't closing questions because we want to close questions. We're closing questions because they need to be improved by the OP (i.e., fixing the question requires OP's perspective or knowledge) before they are compatible with the site's objectives, which do not necessarily align with yours as a person who has a question.
This is not a punishment and is not in general a permanent state. Closed questions can be, and are, re-opened if the problem with the question is fixed (without fundamentally changing it).
> I just opened the site after some time away. At the top, pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation, Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks.
And the people doing the majority of the curation work do not care in the slightest about reputation or badges. I certainly don't.
The users with the most reputation are generally the ones who spend hours a day answering easy questions that don't come anywhere close to meeting the site's standards (not because they're easy, but because they're terribly asked and probably duplicates) after doing a bit of mind-reading to figure out what the terribly-asked question is (or scanning through a couple dozen lines of code for trivial problems without really reading the question - because they usually don't need to) and getting a quick upvote and accept from the OP.
Questions like that have ruined the site and continue to make it worse - by diluting search results, by making it harder for curators to find the "canonical" targets for closing duplicates, by click-baiting away from questions other people actually want to find (e.g. by describing a completely different problem with all the same keywords, or by completely misidentifying what's wrong), and most of all by the broken-window effect (bad content examples overwhelm good ones).
But the reputation system rewards people who answer those questions. (The obsessive answer writers I complain about the most in Stack Overflow chat often have 10x or more my reputation.)
Curators have had a goal of closing bad new questions quickly (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263), trying to beat the answer to the punch. But answer-writers get a grace period, and can fill in a stub answer and edit it later; and they can act unilaterally while curators usually have to come to a consensus.