You appear to have completely reversed the sense of my last paragraph. I was saying completely the opposite.

No, I think that it is very simple: you admit that there are cases where bareword filehandles are impossible to use (and you are quite correct). Now, (he asks) are there cases where lexical filehandles are impossible to use, and barewords are preferable? I assert that there are not.

Rather than switching back and forth in a dog's breakfast of filehandles, most programmers like to pick the cleanest, most flexible option to standardize on. Now if you change your code in the future from one of those "bareword ok" cases to a "bareword impossible" case, you don't have to alter every reference to the old filehandle.

Personally, the winning argument for me is that the scope of a lexical FH is lexically restricted. All things being totally equal, I will pick the option with the narrowest possible scope of effect.

I do agree with you that this matter has little to do with the actual question at hand. It is worth mentioning to beginners, though.