Unfortunately, you are right. I am optimistic, however.

IE used to not GC cyclical JS/DOM references. Google Chrome is doing a massive rework of DOM garbage collection with Oilpan.

You are right that it is not a trivial change, but there is nothing technically infeasible about GC'ing per closure. I think it is worth it, just as it was worth it for IE to have smarter GC.

They are not going to "fix it", it is working as intended with the deliberate tradeoff because almost no real world code is affected by it.