> "We've made this mistake before so for consistency we need to repeat it" is such a bad idea.

no it's not. you literally have no other choice. you cannot add scopes after the fact - it is a breaking change. you cannot have some parts of the language have scopes and others not - it's so much worse for the user. think about human languages and which ones get quoted as being the hardest to learn (those with many exceptions). you're just wrong.