This seems quite normal in companies. Obviously the size, age and (development) leadership in companies would determine exactly how "excellent" released code could be. My career has mostly been as web (application) developer at small companies that had a priority other than "highly skilled developers." The priority was usually "a complete web site that functioned." Whatever ugly, un-reviewed code that made it into that released product was fine, as long as it "functioned." None of these places included code-review as part of the release process, so there's zero chance of preventing code being released that wasn't written with full understanding.

Personally, I only came in contact with the term "closure" rather recently. Scope was something I intuitively understood since my early days as a coder, and read about. This is the good and bad of being completely self-taught in most respects. There was no linear escalation of education to hold my hand through each and every concept. I would try code that I felt would work. Usually it would. Was it elegant, self-contained, de-coupled? Nope, not at all. But it functioned.