Sure, but always complaining about it not working in the REPL. None of those posts were complaining that IJulia should reject their code too—soft scoping is the intuitive behavior.
As for it being unilateral, that’s certainly true. If I’d waited for consensus we’d still be here arguing about it, and meanwhile I need to teach non-programming classes using Julia where explaining the concept of scoping in the middle of a math lecture is impractical. If you’re teaching a programming class, in contrast, most of the code is probably in functions anyway, and you can always turn the soft scoping off. In retrospect I think I made the right choice.
(I don’t think having different scoping rules for interactive code vs. scripts is good, just that it is our least-bad non-breaking option.)