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To be pedantic, html parsing is not lenient, it is unambiguously specified.

if that were true then browsers would refuse to render text/html responses that didn't include a closing </html> tag, i guess

No, because the closing </html> tag can be omitted according to the current HTML spec. See https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#optional-tags

this is exactly my point

html is not precisely defined

I think you're missing the point that it is defined, the current html5 spec says that <title> implies the existence of <head>, <body> implies the end of <head>, body tags imply the end of <head> and the start of <body> etc.

HTML5 is not XHTML.

<!DOCTYPE html> <title>Title <h1>Heading

expands to

<!DOCTYPE html> <head><title>Title</title></head> <body><h1>Heading</h1></body>

if `<title>A <h1>Heading` is equivalent to `<head><title>A</title></head> <body><h1>Heading</h1></body>` then this means the language is not precisely defined

Sorry I don't understand your argument. HTML is fully and unambiguously defined, as you can see if you follow the link. Some tags are optional in certain contexts, but this is also precisely defined.

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